Writ Large Volume 2, Issue 1

W R I T L A R G E

2014 - ‘15 Vol. #02, Issue #01 University of Massachusetts Boston

Editor In Chief Lucas Goren Contributors Cady Vishniac, Timothy Musoke, Heike Schotten, Dr. Federico Mayor, Elora Halim Chowdhury, Krishna Sapkota, John Ingersoll, Ezekiel Edwards, Mark Warren, Benjamin Spencer.

Special Thanks To Donna Neal, Mike Metzger, Rajini Srikanth, American Civil Liberties Union, UMB English Department, UMB Political Science Department, UMB Honors College, UMB McCormack Graduate School, The Watermark Journal.

contact us. editor@writlargemag.org

CONTENTS

3 Internships and the Single Mom 6 Help!

7 A Cry For Africa 10 Injustice and Inequality in Israel/Palestine 13 UNESCO Interview 17 Violence Against Woman 22 What A Day! 26 A.C.L.U. Interview 29 A Day In the Life 32 Mark Warren Interview 36 You sad, bro?

Internships and the

SINGLE

Mom

by Cady Vishniac

I

just got accepted to an internship editing copy at an awesome paper that I’ve been reading nonstop for years! I’m not starting for a while yet, but I’m psyched! Hooray!

Plenty of people have written at length about what they consider the evils of unpaid internships, so I won’t bother piling on. Suffice it to say that yes, of course I’d rather work for money. But I’m still excited to work at all. I look forward to having another line on my resume and a consistent history of employment without any oversize gaps. I’m glad of the opportunity to meet the folks who might act as my references in the future, when I ask for real work.

The day I got hired (“hired”), was also my daughter’s birthday. She’s two. I’m twenty-eight, and fully aware the internship economy is the worst thing that could possibly happen to a person like me.

Disclaimer!

I know that the places offering unpaid internships aren’t typically doing so because they’re evil. I imagine they’re doing it at least in part because everybody else is, and because it’s very hard to compete with people who have an unlimited pool of free labor when you don’t.

I’m not mad at any of my bosses, current or past, but I’m furious at the internship economy—a contumely they did not bring about and cannot fix.

I also know I’m lucky. Whenever I start to feel down about the challenges that face me as an undergraduate student who also happens to have given birth, I take a moment to consider the vast differences between myself and other student moms. I am working this internship because I have parents who can af3 Writ Large Magazine

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ford to feed and house me and even pay for daycare, as well as an aunt who likes to babysit.

Heck, I’m not even going to be a single mom for much longer. My fabulous, patient, wonderful genius of a partner moves in at the end of this semester.

Good for me! Now, back to this article.

A Change for the Worse I know things used to be different. A single mother could go to college, then get an entry-level job. She might worry about supporting herself and her child while in school, maybe take on part-time waitressing or retail work, and she would almost certainly have a heavier burden than that of her teenage classmates, but there would be some possibility of success for her. Four years of sleep-deprivation, and she’d be able to secure herself a future.

The added expectation that a single mother work for free during her time in school—in addition to taking care of her kid(s) and working for money—means that the “college experience” is now out of reach for most of us, and those who do go are getting the rawest of deals.

Work an internship? Really? Single moms are already doing too much, and with this latest demand on their time, their grades will suffer terribly.

A single mom with a job, an internship, and even a half-time course load is nearly always going to be an exhausted husk earning a slew of Cs. There is only so much stress and sleep-deprivation a body can take before the mind starts to be affected.

Nor can this problem be solved by making all internships pay, then encouraging students to ditch

their other jobs for the internship, because as long as internships only last a semester or a year, they aren’t doable for your average single mother. There aren’t a lot of people out there who are eager to sacrifice regular work in order to string together a series of temporary gigs, and any person with dependents who thinks this strategy is viable ought to have her head examined.

I Need an Internship

At two, my daughter has still never slept through the night, not really, and the time she spends awake is not exactly a Hallmark commercial. She is bright, inquisitive, and a toddler. She has what the workers at her daycare call “a strong personality,” which is code for “a tendency to tantrum every five seconds combined with the smarts she needs to outwit every adult in the room.” Oy. It’s tempting, under these conditions, not to intern. But what happens if I don’t? I might as well not even go to college. There are no entry-level positions left in my field or nearly any other. Employers are looking for recent graduates who already have years of experience.

It’s also true that I, like most mothers earning B.A.s, go to a school that isn’t exactly Ivy League. No, I go somewhere affordable, somewhere where many of the students are older. Somewhere where 61 percent of the people who apply get admitted. I think UMass Boston is a better school than this number leads some folks to believe, but the people doing the hiring don’t care that I like it here or that my classmates are genuinely bright people. I still need the internship to shore up my CV, because a bachelor’s degree from an institution with a four-year graduation rate of 13 percent* impresses no one. Here is the unmanageable paradox: Internships are both completely unachievable for most single moms and completely necessary to their future successes.

The Cards Are Stacked Against Us

Internships are a neat way for the companies that offer them to work around all those pesky age-discrimination laws. Internships are aimed at people too young to drink, and if you have ever walked into an interview for an internship as a working adult, you know that employers are often surprised and, frankly,

annoyed to see people their own age enter the room.

Even if they’re not (the guy who just hired me was very chill), you yourself, the oldest potential hire in a room full of children, may not be able to help feeling awkward and strange in a way that affects your interview.

In January, The United States District Court of southern New York ruled that interns cannot be sexually harassed, meaning that internships are also a way for companies to work around those pesky laws dealing with hostile work environments. After all, it’s not workplace harassment if there is technically no employer/employee relationship, right?

This part makes my blood boil.

If you’ve never been a single mother, you probably aren’t aware that we walk through life with giant invisible targets on our heads, flashing lights, and sirens that bring creeps of all stripes running. Do you know a single mom? Ask her how men react to hearing that she has a kid. I bet you’ll get some interesting stories. For every guy who’s put off by the idea, there are five more who pressure her for a date, offering to “let” her bring her child along.

The assumption is that single mothers are desperate—desperate for a job, desperate for male attention, just absolutely flat-out dying for guys to deign to buy us drinks. The assumption is that each of us wants a man—any man—badly enough not to care if he’s one of our married bosses, for example.

Putting a class of people who are viewed in such a way in a position where sexual harassment laws don’t apply is a recipe for disaster. Women I know and care about, as well as countless women I have never heard of, are constantly quitting jobs to avoid predatory bosses, but at least real jobs give these women some hope of redress, a way to protect themselves. Internships do not, and are therefore especially harmful to those most at risk of sexual harassment: women in general, and vulnerable women, such as single mothers, in particular.

Finally, internships exist in order to help companies work around those pesky labor laws. What do you do with desperate young people? If you’re one of the more unscrupulous employers of interns, you blur their boundaries, take advantage, demand inhuman quantities of work be done at home. A single mother, who has to pick up her kid from daycare, feed that kid, and put that kid to bed, is either going to have to turn down your offer of an internship 2014/’15

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because of your crazy demands or suffer your disapproval because she just can’t keep up with the average unencumbered teenager.

What People Think I’m Talking About When I

Talk About Internships Some of them just don’t want to hear it. They spew stories about “strong” (for some reason, everybody always uses this word) single moms they have known, telling me how admirable my actions are, how sure they are that I’ll make it. But I should have the right not to make it, not to succeed on these terms. Rather than praising single moms for the ability to go without sleep or social lives or spare time or adult friends, we should be asking ourselves why that bar is so high—why does a single mom have to be superhuman to get by?

And some of them don’t get it. It’s easy to predict the sort of responses I’ll get to pointing out what an internship economy does to single moms, because these are just variations on the responses to any person who objects to her lot under the yoke of latestage capitalism.

“Why did you choose to have a child/leave your husband/sleep more than two hours a night/improve your odds with an education in the first place?” I am asked by everybody, all the time, everywhere. “Don’t you understand that the one bad decision I think you made several years ago is a perfectly valid reason for you and your toddler to forever be denied any sort of shot at a decent life?”

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Picture This Imagine, if you can, that I’m not “asking for a handout” and I’m not interested in “special treatment,” that I’m not trying to force you to have a baby so I feel better about my own kid (I feel pretty good about her regardless), that it is absolutely none of your business why I’m no longer married, and that it doesn’t actually make me feel good when you tell me how “strong” you think single moms are.

Imagine that while I understand how degrading it can feel to work for free, the ability to work for free is an unattainable privilege for most women in my situation.

I know that even rich kids with perfect lives deserve to be treated with respect—the sort of respect they might find at paying jobs with legal protection from harassment and exploitation—but imagine that I’m also sick of bemoaning the poor treatment of middle-to-upper-class teenagers.

We need to start discussing the ways in which making college itself worthless—emphasizing extracurriculars for which adults with lives have no time—makes it impossible for a large number of working-class people and more-than-teenagers to succeed, regardless of their relative dedication or abilities. We need to acknowledge that a system of semester-long auditions for paying work takes food out of the mouths of the women who need it most, and robs those women’s children.

Cady Vishniac and her daughter, Luta.

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Writ Large Magazine 6

A Cry For Afr

by Timothy

rica Musoke

It

is clear that the prevailing limitations to accessible and effective medical care continue to plague many developing countries. While these limitations cascade from factors such as entrenched poverty, escalating corruption and inherently inadequate technological advancement in these countries, it is rather disheartening to realize that internationally recognized health regulatory bodies are not responding appropriately enough to counteract the countless epidemics in the developing world. In particular, the African continent has suffered in the past, and continues to suffocate from widespread infectious and non-infectious diseases that may directly or indirectly hinder socioeconomic and intellectual development of its people and the communities at large.

any of the above resources from their natural states into more productive and operational ones, with the potential to improve the lives of the global human population, is so often overlooked. It cannot be emphasized more, that in order for any human to harness the skills, talents and/or knowledge required to make a substantial difference in the world today, the person must feel some sense of serenity or security.

The reduced sense of panic that accompanies many illnesses in developed countries, where symptoms of a fever can be alleviated by a physician’s prescription, is completely foreign to some people in remote villages or even cities in some African countries. This is not to say that all African countries, cities, towns or villages have extremely poor access to medication, but the majority suffer from a shortage of these basic privileges.

Africa, the second largest continent in the world with a population of over one billion people, boasts of a myriad of resources-oil, diamonds, copper, wood, petroleum-all of which are fully exploitable and exceedingly beneficial. Greatest among these is the human population, whose ability to transform

In spite of all of this, it cannot be said that developed countries have turned a blind eye to these issues. A number of programs initiated by the World Health Organization (WHO), United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and other 2014/’15

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global health initiatives have endeavored to create stronger and more concrete healthcare systems in Africa that strive to improve the health of people all over the continent. Sadly, despite all these efforts, the statistics are daunting. In 2010, 91% of deaths from malaria in regions prone to malaria infection occurred in Africa. It gets worse because 70% of these deaths are of children under five. Most of these children cannot access effective medical care due to drug shortages in equally understaffed medical facilities. Additionally, there is insufficient funding to train and bring these clinical specialists up to speed with the latest technology that can efficiently diagnose and treat particular ailments. This considered, a more coordinated effort by developed countries to improve aspects such as medical diagnostic technologies in African countries could mean that children with currently limited access to efficacious medical treatments may indeed grow up to achieve the success they dream of.

The recent Ebola outbreak in West Africa has brought to light a number of issues regarding the international response to a life threatening crisis such as a fast and wide spreading hemorrhagic fever in Africa. According to Pardis Sabeti, a Professor at Harvard University and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard whose research focuses on infectious diseases, this Ebola outbreak could have been contained if proper and more effective diagnostic tools had been used to deal with the early cases of Ebola.

She notes that if teams of trained individuals had been sent in to isolate and treat the sick before the outbreak spread out to villages and across Sierra Leone to four other countries, it might not have become the globally grief-striking crisis that it is today.

As unfortunate as it could get, Sierra Leone’s leading virologist, Dr. Sheik Umar Khan died while tirelessly treating patients diagnosed with Ebola. This was a considerable loss to the force of virologists dedicated to eradicating viral infection in not just Sierra Leone and West Africa, but the world at large. Additionally, the first cases of Ebola detected as early as May this year indicated that the virus was rapidly mutating and was already spreading fast within the population. As Dr. Sabeti mentions, the rapid rate at which the virus spread could have been minimized if better diagnostic facilities, capable of performing the necessary quick diagnosis for any one who showed signs of infection, had been set up in Sierra Leone and the other affected West African countries.

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This raises a crucial point: if Western countries are quick to invest in multiple business interests within Africa such as the oil, mining, trade and real estate industry, what stops them from having a similarly enthusiastic approach to improving the fledgling health care systems in Africa? It is quite evident that a highly virulent epidemic such as this recent Ebola outbreak creates global panic. In a bid to control the spread of the Ebola virus, Australia and Canada have imposed travel bans on travelers from West Africa by denying them visas, while the US has implemented the use of thermal scanners to detect unusually high temperatures of passengers coming in through major airports. Similarly, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said, “To completely seal off and don’t let planes in or out of the West African countries involved, then you could paradoxically make things much worse in the sense that you can’t get supplies in, you can’t get help in, you can’t get the kinds of things in there that we need to contain the epidemic.” The rising global panic in response to Ebola is simply overwhelming. However, this situation would probably have been contained if the appropriately structured health care systems in West Africa had been established. Interestingly, the head of the World Health Organization recently said there is still no Ebola vaccine 40 years after the disease first emerged because it previously affected only poor African nations. This raises another question: now that Ebola has found its way out of poor African countries into wealthier and more developed countries, will there be an accelerated response to developing a vaccine? If we live in a world where all humanity is considered equal, is it not unfair that the need to develop a vaccine for a deadly hemorrhagic fever should only arise because it no longer affects poor African countries, but has emerged in the developed world?

There is an astoundingly limitless potential in African human resources that is waiting to be utilized.

The struggling healthcare systems in various African countries can be developed in ways that grant people living in poverty the basic medical care they require to survive and influence the community and world around them. It will take the coordination of many countries – developing and developed – to achieve this goal, but the end result is well worth the necessary investment of time, funds, and international cooperation.

“Israel/Palestine Has perhaps the Distinct privilege Of being a ‘conflict’ That many feel is ‘Too complicated’ To understand” Injustice and Inequality in Israel/Palestine

by Heike Schotten

The situation in Israel/Palestine is all-toooften presented as a “conflict” between two sides. While there has been controversy over the years as what to call the disputants (Israel vs. Israelis vs. Zionists vs. Jews; Palestinians vs. Arabs), the fact that there is a “conflict” in this region and that it is perpetuated by two distinct, demarcatable groups of people seems widely agreed-upon.

Beyond this, however, it often becomes difficult for people to say. Israel/Palestine has perhaps the distinct privilege of being a “conflict” that many feel is “too complicated” to understand, one about which they often prefer not to have an opinion or which they feel uncomfortable discussing.

Nevertheless, the fact of the matter is that the situation in Israel/Palestine is not all that complicated. This is not because this

region lacks an intricate history worth understanding in detail, nor because it is unnecessary to learn about a place before one analyzes it. Rather, the situation in Israel/ Palestine is not so complicated because it is not, in fact, a “conflict” comprised of two equal combatants with equal claims to legitimacy for their actions.

Indeed, much of the confusion and discomfort people experience when it comes to adjudicating the situation in Israel/Palestine stems from either a feeling of helplessness at discriminating between what seem to be two equal political claims, or a reticence to engage the matter at all for fear that questioning or criticizing Israel might implicate them in anti-Semitism.

Luckily, one need fear neither of these difficulties. The truth is, the “conflict” in Israel/Palestine is not an irreconcilable bat2014/’15

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tle between two equal disputants. It is, rather, the continuing legacy of Jewish settlement of the land of Palestine throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries and the 1948 U.N. partition resolution that divided that land into two separate areas, one for Jews and one for Arabs. This partition was itself a response to both the ongoing colonial impasse in the broader Middle East as well as the genocide of the Jews in Europe. In general, European and U.S. powers preferred not to take responsibility for either their colonization of the Middle East or the Nazi genocide, addressing both problems by aligning themselves with Zionist leaders who sought to create a state for Jews in Palestine, which Zionists referred to as “a land without people for a people without a land.”

Unfortunately, however, there were people in the land of Palestine already. (The notion that there weren’t is a common conceit recognizable in the writings of all sorts of 18th and 19th century European colonial politicians, philosophers, and “explorers.”) The people already living in Palestine were gradually marginalized by the Jewish settlement taking place in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and 750,000 were expelled and dispossessed outright in the war of 1948-9 which resulted in the creation of the state of Israel. Palestinians therefore refer to the founding of Israel as al Nakba, or the catastrophe. It resulted in what has become the world’s largest refugee population: today, nearly 5.3 million Palestinians continue to live in refugee camps, awaiting the fulfillment of their right to return to their homes. Their history in this regard has often been compared to that of Native Americans, the original inhabitants of the Americas, who were driven from their land and often annihilated through war and disease by settler colonialism.

Rather than two equal parties, then, the disputants in Israel/Palestine are better understood as two disparate and unequal powers— Israel, a colonizing nation, on the one hand, and Palestinians, a colonized people, on the 11 Writ Large Magazine

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other. Moreover, this makes clear why “conflict” is an inadequate term to describe what goes on there. The seemingly endless “cycle of violence” that dominates U.S. news coverage of Israel/Palestine is better understood as the product of an ongoing colonization that is not yet fully complete. The unending construction of settlements is one strategy in Israel’s colonial arsenal; the blockade of the Gaza Strip and Israel’s recurring wars against it are another To say that the colonization of Palestine is incomplete is simply to say that

“There simply is no comparison between these two powers, whether in terms of military and economic strength or in terms of the ethical and political legitimacy of their actions. The stronger party, Israel, seeks to weaken, control, and expel the Palestinians” the Palestinians have not yet been completely expelled, transferred, removed, or otherwise annihilated. They remain on the land, despite Israel’s interests to the contrary. To understand Israel as a colonial power is therefore to understand that, ultimately, complete colonization of Palestine is Israel’s political endgame.

Although the fundamental inequality that exists between Israel and the Palestinians is critical to understanding the situation in Israel/Palestine, it is largely obscured in the American context. However, it is crucial to keep in mind that, in the final analysis, Israel is a formal nation-state with a government, a functioning economy, a well-funded and sophisticated army, nuclear weapons, and the United States as its primary economic, military, and political ally. Palestinians, by contrast, are a stateless people without a government, an army, a functioning economy, or weaponry beyond ad hoc and largely inept guerrilla arms. Their alliances consist largely of dependency on foreign and international humanitarian aid, and they have been suffering from displacement, dispossession, and occupation for almost 60 years. There

simply is no comparison between these two powers, whether in terms of military and economic strength or in terms of the ethical and political legitimacy of their actions.

The stronger party, Israel, seeks to weaken, control, and expel the Palestinians, who seek simply to remain on their land or to return to land from which they have been displaced.

Understanding Israel/Palestine as among the last outposts of settler colonialism clears up the question of how to adjudicate this “conflict,” since it is better understood as an ongoing struggle between an occupying, colonial power and an occupied, colonized people. However, this understanding may not allay concerns regarding anti-Semitism.

Therefore, it is crucial to point out that recognizing the settler colonial character of Israel is not an exercise in anti-Jewish bigotry. This could only be true if there were no distinction between Israel – a state – and Jews – people who live both within Israel and outside it, and who hold many different views regarding Israel’s existence, importance, legitimacy, and righteousness. Indeed, just as foreigners abroad can criticize the U.S. government without disparaging

“While political violence makes Americans extremely uncomfortable, the issue is less whether or not Palestinians “are” violent or commit violence than what one should do when subject to almost 60 years of forced removal, dispossession, and domination” U.S. citizens (who themselves have many different views regarding the justice and rightness of their government), so too can one criticize the Israeli government without disparaging Jewish people or Judaism.

This is why it can be useful to speak in terms of Zionism rather than Judaism.

Zionism is the belief that Jewish people should rule a nation-state comprised of a Jewish-majority citizenry. Clearly, this is

a belief that can be both held or disputed

by Jews and non-Jews alike. Indeed, many Jews are critical of Zionism, just as many non-Jews support it. The same is true of Jewish Israeli citizens: while many support their government, others oppose it. There are even Jewish Israelis who support the international Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement being organized against the Israeli state in an attempt to end its occupation and dispossession of Palestinians.

In other words, then, it is not anti-Semitic to criticize Israel or the actions of the Israeli government. Nor is it a condemnation of Judaism or Jewish people to note that the state of Israel is, just like the United States (and Canada and Australia), a settler colonial nation that, as such, cannot legitimately cast its fight against the Palestinians as a war of self-defense. The violence committed by both parties to this conflict must be recognized for what it is: the violence of a colonizer seeking to crush an indigenous people (on the part of Israel), and the resistance of a colonized, refugee population under the boot of its oppressor (on the part of Palestinians). While political violence makes Americans extremely uncomfortable, the issue is less whether or not Palestinians “are” violent or commit violence than what one should do when subject to almost 60 years of forced removal, dispossession, and domination. The American preference for non-violence cannot, in this context, be separated out from our own settler-colonial history and imperial interests abroad.

Americans tend, in our understanding of violent conflicts around the world, to sympathize with the dominant power and to see the violence of the dominated as inherently illegitimate. It is time to interrogate that unthinking sympathy in light of what, increasingly, is becoming impossible to disguise: Israel is an occupying, colonial power whose unjust rule is unacceptable in the 21st century. Whether it falls through violence, non-violence, or some combination of the two, there can be no doubt but that it can fall and also that it must.

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85 percent [of the United States] has more money than

3.3 billion people.

That is unaccepta

able

An interview with former UNESCO president, Dr. Federico Mayor.

Early last fall, Writ Large sat down for an interview with the former president of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization [UNESCO], Dr. Federico Mayor. I didn’t quite know what to expect interviewing a man who has ostensibly shaken Vladimir Putin’s hand and openly argued with Bill Clinton. However, upon meeting I found him to be humorous and lively in his retellings of power-broker-style meetings with important government officials.

The interview truly ran the gamut of topics a worldly eighty-year-old and a naïve undergraduate could discuss: broad inequality, capitalism in China, neoliberalism in Europe, racism, red-blooded Republicans, and The Beatles. Really, we covered everything.

I hope you are as informed and entertained while reading the interview as I was conducting it.

- Lucas Goren On global perpetuators of inequality The solution to inequality must be very radical now. Centuries from the origin of time there has been a terrible inequality. Inequality in the hands of males. Always, there has been absolute power in the hands of males. Afterwards, in some countries there have been efforts to avoid this and democracy is the best way in which this inequality can be solved. But it must be genuine democracy because sometimes democracy becomes a way for doing absolute power under a good dressing. And this we must take into account. It’s for this that now we are working very hard, with many people, in order to find different dimensions of democracy that until now have not been taken into account. For example, the most important iteration is ethical democracy, and, afterwards, social democracy. In order to avoid inequalities. Because the inequalities are precisely the cornerstone of all the problems that we have. But afterwards we have also the economic democracy, the cultural democracy, international democracy.

Then yes, if you have an international system based on democracies for these ideas that we have been talking about – democratic multilaterism – the refoundation of the UN but based on democracy: with vote, but without veto. Because the nations start talking about “we the people”, but they say no to the vote of the five [security council members] and the rest you can go to war. But it’s an important issue because it has been very difficult, precisely 15 Writ Large Magazine

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it is said that, “all the aspects and dimensions of economic democracy are subordinated to social justice.” You realize the importance of this? It means that all the aspects must be set. Our objective in this democracy is social justice. Because you can imagine a more tragic inequality that today OXFAM has given a report in which it is said that 85 percent, most of this country, and most of them belonging to the republican party, have more funds than half of humanity. This means that 85 percent have more money than 3.5 billion people. This is the inequality that is absolutely impossible to tolerate. How can we rearrange this? This will never come – never come – from the present institutions.

On ‘Chinese Capitalism’ Because of greed China said they were going to be the factory of the world. And we wanted things cheep and wanted to earn a lot of money, so why not. Now there is a problem, a terrible problem: China is no longer the factory of the world, but the factory for the world. That is very different. Now they are even investing more money than Europe in research and development for military purposes. I think the consequences could be terrible.

I am the chair of the UN commission against the death penalty. Can you imagine having a member of the UN with a veto, who tells us nothing about their executions? Even Iran and Saudi Arabia –

who everyone protects because of their oil – tell us. China, however, refuses because they think this is an “intimate question.” What kind of intimate question is that? We should know how many executions, what kind of executions, and for what reason are they executing people.

On the United Nations’ veto system What we cannot have is that we have one veto.

If China says “No!”, all that you have prepared is for nothing. Then, I repeat, we must have a well-weighted system. But, we cannot have this immense inequality of those that have the vote and those that have the veto. In Spanish the only difference between “voto” and “veto” is one letter.

It is because of this that many people say to me, “You know, the United Nations of which we dream is one without the veto.”

On racism and the election of Barack Obama I am a person who has seen many terrible things, but I was amazed when I saw a black man elected to be president of the United States. Immediately, I wrote a poem for Rosa Parks. Because it’s then you realize it’s small gestures of the people saying “no” to a man trying to oppress them, for instance, that can inspire huge moments of solidarity like the ones we saw with the subsequent march on Washington.

I tell you this because you must realize that at one point I went to a restaurant in Cape Town and saw a sign that said “No Blacks, No Dogs.” Can you imagine what a terrible inequality there was there?

And here? These things are now on their way to being done for.

On Neoliberalism in Europe Can you imagine what has happened in Europe?

The ‘markets’, without direction, have appointed a government in the cradle of democracy, in Greece.

Then ‘they’ said, “ah we did this, let’s try again in Italy.” And so they did the same in Italy. Governments all around Europe have had austerities levied upon them with little warning.

If you have all that you prepare starting with economy, the social aspects will never arrive. We must put social priorities first. And therefore we must have a security council on social economy. Or

if you would like we could have a social-economic council. As we have today, we have only a security council. And then, another thing that is very important is that we will have an environmental council. The world cannot follow as we are now; we are forgetting our children, our grandchildren; we are forgetting the next generation. This is intolerable.

And it is also a matter of inequality. Because we are at this moment giving all the power to the present generations and we are forgetting the coming ones.

Therefore we have a thing that is very important and it is visible – that is, the general assembly will be for the first time for the people. You can say, “this is too much.” No. In fact, Woodrow Wilson when he created the League of Nations gave the capacity to have representatives of a global civil society. We today have a relic of the past.

On the priorities of the United States I remember in the year 2004, the Director General of the FIO asked me to come and lead an assembly on the human right to food. I accepted.

When I got there, Israel and the United Kingdom, who are very close to the United States, voted in favor of the human right to food. Everyone did… except for the representation from the United States. And then I said, “I’m going to make a break for it, because the U.S. has to realize that they are not giving a right, they are recognizing one.” The rights are inherent to our persons. So, I asked the U.S. assembly, “What’s the problem here?” And they ask, “Who’s gonna pay for this?” To which I said, “Everyone but you recognizes this right, if you don’t vote for it it’s going to be a disaster.” But they persisted. They said no.

So the next time around, at the forum held in the U.S., we made it so that the ‘honorary’ country, the host country, had to sign last. Every country signed the charter declaring access to food and water as a human right. When it came to the U.S., the last country to sign, they had no choice. To not sign after everyone else had would have been a great embarrassment.

On “The Beatles” As they said, “all you need is love.”

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Violence Against Woman We Need a Transnational Analytic of Care

by Elora Halim Chowdhury

W

hen gender-based violence occurs in the Global South, how should feminists in the Global North respond? Sometimes feminists in Europe and the United States say nothing, fearful that their attempts to speak out about gender violence in South Asia, Africa, Latin America, or other formerly colonized regions will reproduce colonial dynamics. At other times they do speak, and their language echoes imperial narratives about needing to “rescue” downtrodden women from “backward” cultural traditions. To move to a more constructive place, we need to foster a transnational analytic of care: one that is not defensive, reactionary, or silencing. We need an analytic of care that is cognizant of the local and global processes that create conditions of vulnerability for women and form the asymmetrical planes in which cross-cultural alliances and solidarity practices must happen.

The urgency of our need for more constructive forms of transnational feminist solidarity became particularly apparent in December 2012, when feminists across the globe took to the pen and the streets in response to the gruesome gang rape 17 Writ Large Magazine

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of a young woman in New Delhi, the capital of India. The twenty-three-year-old woman was returning home after watching the film The Life of Pi with a male friend in a shopping mall in South Delhi. She and her companion that night tried to hail public buses and auto-rickshaws to no avail. Eventually, a private chartered bus stopped to picked them up. There were six men on the bus, including the driver, his younger brother (who posed as the conductor), and four others who worked in various low-skilled jobs in the city and were economic migrants from neighboring states. The bus did not have a permit to be on the roads after-hours; investigations later revealed that the traffic police had been bribed in order for it to pass through security checkpoints. The men on the bus, apparently on a “joyride,” beat the young woman and her friend. When the woman and her friend resisted, they dragged her to the back of the bus and took turns raping her. The assault lasted several hours as the bus plowed through the city streets, and involved the insertion of a metal rod into the woman’s body, which caused her intestines to spill out. Afterward, the couple was stripped naked and thrown off the bus. The driver tried to run over the woman, but her friend managed to pull her out of the way.

The young woman’s ordeal did not stop there: for nearly half an hour, passersby ignored the pair’s cries for help. When the police finally arrived, instead of transporting the woman and her friend immediately to the nearest hospital, they argued over jurisdiction. The woman fought for her life for two weeks and finally succumbed to her injuries in a hospital in Singapore. Even though the government ostensibly flew her to Singapore for better care, many in India were critical of the move as her condition was too fragile—they saw the move as a gesture by the government to dampen the public outrage and massive protests in Delhi and all over India. The men accused of this brutal crime are currently standing trial in a fast-track court. In the face of mounting civil protests, the government set up a committee that brought representatives from diverse constituencies in India to put forth a set of legal and social recommendations to deal with violence and discrimination against women. Even though feminist groups found these recommendations inadequate, indeed a “mockery,” some believe that the changes underway in legal and social policy may set the stage for transforming structures and attitudes around women’s rights, access, and citizenship.

A

Feminist Responses

mid the avalanche of feminist responses to this particular event, a debate ensued around the question of the appropriate terms of engagement with women’s oppression in the Global South. Crudely speaking, many feminists in the West were either called out for not being critical enough of patriarchal social structures in India that contribute to violence against women or blamed for casting Indian men and culture within a colonial mindset that sees misogyny as an inherently Eastern phenomenon. By extension this mindset obscures a long history of using the status of women in a society as the measure of its progress, which aids colonial and imperial missions. At the same time, while many responses in the Indian media were powerful in pointing out apathy and misogyny in India’s state machinery and public attitudes toward women’s roles in society, some of these narratives also engaged in problematic class-based assumptions about the “natural link” between poverty and violent masculinity. These responses fell short of shining light on globalization and the structural inequalities that play a role in producing both 2014/’15

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victims and perpetrators of violence. Focusing on poverty in a narrow sense, they failed to discuss the global economic conditions that make poor women and men especially vulnerable to extreme violence and suffering.

This kind of skewed narrative supports the continuation of an imperialist feminism that seeks to “rescue” downtrodden women from backward cultural traditions and misogynist states and men. At the same time, it can obscure the fact that violence is not confined to any particular group in society but rather cuts across class, religion, ethnicity, and region. The imperialist baggage in feminist perceptions about women in the Global South is further reflected in a policy task force entitled “Beyond Gender Equality,” which was set up at Harvard University following the New Delhi gang rape and is preparing to offer recommendations to India (and other South Asian countries). In response to this initiative, a group of prominent Indian feminists published a sardonic piece in the online publication Kafila detailing the decades-long, painstaking work of feminists in India advocating for justice for victims of sexual violence. These feminists, infuriated by the task force at Harvard, wrote, “Perhaps you will allow us to repay the favor, and next time President Obama wants to put in place legislation to do with abortion, or the Equal Rights Amendment, we can step in and help and, from our small bit of experience in these fields, recommend what the United States can do.”

Such patronizing U.S. attempts to offer guidance to women in India appear hollow when we consider that the United States is one of the few nations that have not ratified the UN Convention for Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (placing it in the company of states like Sudan, Somalia, and Iran—countries that the United States does not hesitate to condemn as part of an “axis of evil”). It is astonishing that UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon issued a statement calling on Indian government leaders “to do everything in their power to take up radical reforms, ensure justice and reach out with robust public services to make women’s lives

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more safe and secure” when no such statement has been directed toward the U.S. government, despite the fact that there is a reported rape in the United States every 6.2 minutes, and one in five U.S. women will be raped in her lifetime.

Ultimately such posturing over moral ground also overlooks how first world neoliberal policies contribute to a climate of insecurity and vulnerability for women (and men) in the Global South.

Overlooking the consequences of neo-liberal policies is, of course, not strictly a Western phenomenon. Speaking to this point, social activist Vandana Shiva was critical of the Indian prime minister’s suggestion that “loose-footed migrants” are contributing to the problem of violence against women. Because the Delhi rape involved migrants on both sides (both the victims and the perpetrators were migrants), Shiva points out:

“

The rapists were all living in slums in hugely brutalized conditions, thinking that brutalization is the norm. The [young woman’s] father had sold his land because farmers aren’t being allowed to make a living. Two hundred and seventy thousand Indian farmers have committed suicide in recent decades. The rest are hanging on the margins of existence. He [the young woman’s father] moved to Delhi to load luggage at the airport to be able to survive and send his children to school. . . . Mr. Prime Minister, they are a product of your policies.

They are refugees of your economic policies.

”

In another strand of the debate, political activist and author Arundhati Roy observed that there was nothing inherently exceptional about this case—it was made exceptional by the unprecedented nature of the citizens’ uprisings that it sparked. She criticized the response to the event as highly selective and drawing in mostly the middle and upper-middle classes because they could relate to the “victim,” to whom Roy mistakenly assigned a middle-class identity. Even though the young woman herself came from a family that had migrated to Delhi for better opportunities, and she worked at a call center at

night to help finance her education as a physiotherapist, these facts were overshadowed in many readers’ minds by the choice of the movie she and her friend had seen, the location of the mall they had visited, and the initial reports about her career aspirations—all likely signifiers of a middle-class identity. Roy’s larger point perhaps was that rape is not exceptional but routine in most parts of India. Also her point that similar protests have not been sparked by routine, everyday violence against minorities in India—for example, the rape of Dalit women by upper-caste men or the systematic rape of women in conflict zones by the Indian Army—is a point well taken.

Roy was right to raise concern about selective empathy and the selective exercise of responsibility and care across borders.

Factory Collapse: Another Form of Violence

W

estern feminists often move from describing women’s suffering in the Global South as a consequence of patriarchal oppression to suggesting that women in the Global South can be empowered through neoliberal economic ventures that create opportunities for self-reliance. But the April 2013 collapse of the Rana Plaza factory building in Bangladesh came as a powerful blow to the image of the “self-reliant” third world woman worker—the backbone of the national economy and the transnational supply chain. The factory collapse killed upward of 1,100 workers in the ready-made garments industry.

In the last three decades Bangladesh has become the second-largest supplier (trailing China) in the global apparel industry, employing nearly 4 million workers, most of whom are young women. Eighty percent of exports in Bangladesh are in this sector, constituting a $19-billion-peryear industry. Despite being the “golden goose” of the economy, the workers in this sector face dismal working conditions and compensation.

The flagrant disregard for their humanity could not be more apparent than when the owner of the Rana Plaza building and the supervisors

of its factories forced the workers back into the premises the day after it was declared an unsafe construction. They were not going to be paid their monthly salary, the managers informed the workers, unless they went to work. In sharp contrast, the employees of the bank and shops also housed on the premises were asked by their employers not to report to work.

The flagrant disregard for the worth of workers’ lives was further apparent in the government’s decision not to accept external assistance in the recovery efforts, in order to project to the global community an image of “self-reliance.” Equally shocking were the bizarre statements of government representatives who minimized the seriousness of the situation and many Western retailers’ refusal to sign on to the building and fire safety contracts. In the end it was ordinary civilians from all corners of Bangladesh who rushed to coordinate and carry out the monumental task of pulling out bodies of dead and injured workers, facing great risk to their own well-being in the process. The stories of Shahina Akhter, who remained buried alive for five days before finally succumbing to her injuries just as rescue workers were drilling to get her out, Kaikobad, a construction worker who toiled to pull twenty-six workers out of the rubble before dying from severe burns from trying to operate a drill machine, and Reshma Begum, the miracle survivor who was pulled out alive after seventeen days, will be forever etched in the minds of those who followed this entirely avoidable catastrophe.

No other image, however, has captured the gravity of the disaster as powerfully as Taslima Akhter’s photograph Death of Thousand Dreams, which was named the most haunting depiction of the tragedy by the photo editors of TIME. The photograph shows a man and a woman in a loving embrace in the last moment of their lives. We know neither who they are, nor whether the couple shared a relationship outside of their death embrace. Perhaps they sought comfort, feeling a profound connection to each other, humanity, and the divine, as the plaster, steel, and concrete came crashing down on them like a deck of cards.

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The image defies a number of social and cultural norms in depicting physical contact between a young man and a woman in an ostensibly “public” embrace. The enormity of what was about to happen perhaps made those considerations for modesty, shame, and honor immaterial.

The man is seen to be covering the woman’s torso in a protective embrace even as his own trauma is signified by blood—resembling a tear— trickling down from the corner of his closed left eye.

“

In the end it was ordinary civilians from all corners of Bangladesh who rushed to coordinate and carry out the monumental task of pulling out bodies of dead and injured workers, facing great risk to their own well-being in the process While not minimizing the reality of male violence against women, I’d like to propose that this photo poses a visual challenge to Western feminist narratives of the “downtrodden third world female” and her “violent and oppressive” male counterpart. It expands our understanding of women’s oppression beyond the lens of “male violence” to one of structural violence and encourages an analytic of connectivity as the root of deep solidarity. Death of Thousand Dreams also draws our attention to the structural inequality of globalization, colonial relations between supplier and buyer nations, corporate greed, corrupt state machinery, and disregard for the poor workers—male and female—in each tier.

All of these structures of power contribute to the exposure of certain populations in the Global South to extreme violence and suffering. And the image also illuminates the kin, community, and human connection that is at the base of all of our existence. At the very least it should urge us to rethink some of the outdated, tired, and prejudicial paradigms that continue to limit the scope of our understanding and inspiration to practice more egalitarian, just, dignified, and humane interactions with one another.

This article was reprinted with permission from Duke University Press.

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”

What

A Day !

by Krishna K. Sapkota

The alarm went off. The most annoying sound in America, but that day, it was exciting to hear it. Slowly, I opened my eyes and turned it off. Then I heard a crack! A bamboo bed cracked next door. No matter how thick the mattress in between the body and the bamboo-chimed bed might be, when someone wakes up from it, a crack would be heard.

“Amma, what time is it?” a next-door uncle asked in a dull voice. “ Four in the morning,” the aunty shouted in a sharp chirp. Her words travelled right through their bamboo wall like a drop of water dripping into my ear hole. It reached my half-conscious ears, fully waking me.

she had no idea about. I was not sure where she learned that, probably from anti-resettlement folks, who favored repartition, and at that point, I thought they knew nothing about what they were after.

★★★ This was in Nepal—which lies seven thousand, nine hundred, and seven miles east like a wild yam in-between two big rocks, India and China.

Her words threw me out of my bed with rage. Another Crack! This one of course was from my own. You know now, it was a bamboo-chimed bed, too. It was my turn “I could not sleep well. It has been a noisy to bathe, as every one in my family already night next door. They are almost ready to had. My mother was preparing breakfast on leave I guess,” the aunty added. a briquette hearth, while my father was on dhyan like Buddha on a cross-leg posture “Let them go, why do you worry?” whisright in front of the altar near the smoky pered the uncle. “They listened to none.

White men will make them wash their under briquette hearth, while my sisters were wares in Amrika,” the aunty murmured—a dressing up and putting their makeup on.

Quickly, I reached out to a bamboo-skelvery rude and negative expression—for eton rack and grabbed a mug, still furious what I considered a promised land which 2014/’15

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having heard what the next-door aunty just said.

Suddenly, I dipped my index finger into the bucket full of water fetched yesterday evening, just before it was time for the tap to stop. Enraged, I still was. But the water was so cold that it almost smoothed my ruffled feathers. Slowly, I moved my hand around my half-naked body with a Janai worn across my chest, and felt sharp goose bumps jutting out of the surface of my skin pressing against my palm. I pulled a towel out of another bamboo-rag that stood against the outer-wall near the main door facing toward the hearth, threw it on my naked shoulder, and got out of the hut with a red bucket with cold water up to its bream—it felt almost frozen, since it was early November, although fall in Nepal is not as nearly cold as Boston. I rather would wait for a whole hour-and-half until 6AM so that I could fetch fresh morning running water from a near by public tap. It was a public tap but some people treated it as if it was their own, which, I no longer had to care about after today.

I was ready, but I remembered the chill I felt at the tip of my index finger just a few minutes earlier. I then started to count: 1-2-3—a bathing trick that I learned very early in the camp.

Splash! That was the first splash. I started to tremble as the cold water began to drop down from my head, slowly towards my toe, from beneath my nylon half-pants. I again counted: 1-2-3,

“ Splash!

Quickly, I threw my towel to hang on an iron string stretched in front of my little bamboo hut where we dry cloths in the sun. It was dark outside. Most of our neighbors were in their deep sleep; but in that silence I could hear someone, a couple of blocks away snoring like a cub. I just did not want to bathe in the bathroom; I was tired of being inside of it for so long—this little bamboo plastic-wrapped, bamboo-plastic-roofed bathroom tent was not tall enough for even my height. I always felt suffocated being inside of it but never did anything to change it. I do not know why. I instead, decided to bathe at the edge of a canal—about twenty meters away.

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Splash!

Splash!

”

Those were second, third, and the forth splashes.

Now the cold water has even reached to places that sun never gets to see. I quickly rubbed a soap bar from my head to toe in less than fifteen seconds. Then: Splash! Splash! Splash! Splash!

Splash! Splash! I grabbed the bucket, which had about one-fifth remaining—the cold water at the bottom as silent as the sea. While I lifted the bucket high, it made a splashing sound as though some one just whispered Khuchim as I was shivering. And another big Splash! It’s empty now.

I’m done. Quickly, I grabbed the empty bucket and the mug, rushed to the cloth string with completely wet half-pants with cold water dripping down near my knees to the courtyard below.

I grabbed the hanging towel, and quickly rubbed my upper body dry, entered into the bathroom, wrapped the towel around my waist, and discarded wet clothes. That day I did not have to worry

about washing it, squeezing it, and hanging on the string for a whole day to sundry. I got out of the bathroom, bowed my head to make sure it did not touch the roof, and quickly entered into my hut through the main bamboo door to a curtained room to dress up for our journey, where all our baggage were waiting, ready to fly.

★★★ Though I hated being a refugee for over seventeen years and hated being in this situation, waking away from the camp, and those families I once didn’t know but had become my own, was a painful experience. What about leaving behind friendships and the bonds that have been developed over these seventeen years? And knowing that you might never return to them? It was sorrowful.

Now it’s six AM. Some friends and relatives have come and now are gone with tears in their eyes and aches in their hearts, leaving the same thing on our side. It was time for us to part. Tears again started to roll down from my eyes on to my checks and down onto the floor, while some of my friends and relatives started putting tika on our foreheads, sobbing, bursting into tears, and being speechless, not knowing what to say. We said goodbye to one another and parted ways, but this indeed was a different kind—a farewell with only facial gestures, pinches and aches on hearts, and eyes filled with tears. We started to follow some of my friends and our relatives who had loaded our luggage on their bicycles. My baggage was full with a Khukuri (we carried one as we did not know if we will ever have one again), a pressure cooker (we carried one as we did not know if we could ever have dal whistled on a pressure cooker ever again, as it had become a tradition to us), some books, letters from old friends, documents and clothes. As we moved forward, we would see people standing at the edge of canals in front of their huts staring at us, some children peeping at us through their bamboo walls. I did not know what should I do, whether I should say goodbye or just wave

my hands at them, so I did not do anything and kept walking. There were hundreds of people standing in front of their huts watching us leave.

I knew each and every one of them some way in those years. Once in a while, a friend would come and shake hands and say “safe journey”, reassuring that he or she would take this journey some day soon. We were taking a leap of faith.

Early enough, I knew that it was time for us to leave, while most were still judging between if it is worth embracing a third country resettlement, where every basic human need for survival was provided in the camp (I, at this point, would rather choose death than ever living in such a situation with no hope at all but survival). Never being able to repatriate back to Bhutan meant a lot for most, but not me. I guess fear of the unknown—the change one has to endure migrating to America—was stopping most people from taking the action. But I was ready for anything but refugee camp.

Finally we reached Bangay Bazar. Weaving through another crowd that assembled to see us part, we boarded an IOM bus, which was waiting for us and few other families to arrive. After some time, when all families were aboard, the bus slowly started to move. We waved our last goodbyes, thousands hands were waving in return as the bus gradually left the crowd and the clusters of bamboo huts in a distance. I felt a chill in my heart as if I was on a roller coaster downfall at Six Flags. The crowded bus turned silent, everyone’s eyes filled with tears. The bus took us to an airport where we took our first flight ever to our unknown destinations—our future home. The progression of that day changed my life forever. I went through some painful emotional moments, feelings of loss, and heartache.

★★★ But now, I do not have to live my life the way I did for so long. I do not have to breathe the same air anymore—polluted by briquette hearths.

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that it produced to cook meals every day in the morning and in the evenings. I no longer had to listen to nonsense quarrels and disputes between people and mostly among family members. I no longer had to see bamboo-built-schools and refugee-camp-huts burn to ashes leaving families with nothing. I no longer had to see some someone dying of pneumonia due to lack of medical facilities. I no more had to carry the sick on a bamboo-kamal stretcher and rush to a local health-center only to hear later that heshe died. I no longer had to see funeral processions passing by almost every day, if not twice, or up to four times a day at points.

I, at this point, would rather choose death than ever living in such a situation with no hope at all but survival I would mourn in the beginning, but my feeling changed over time. I would see it just as an event afterwards. I no longer had to witness bloody fights. I no longer had to work for someone in the hope of earning some cash, and then never getting paid. I no longer had to hear about my mom carrying fifty-kilogram ration bags on her weakened back while I’m away for school or work. I no longer had to wake up in the middle of the night due to a leak above my bed, and no longer do I need to anchor myself to the roof to protect against windstorms blowing the roof away. I no longer had to hear complaints about how much black stuff the rice contained. I no longer had to worry about when our next unloading turn was, when was I supposed to guard school and the camp at night, when was I to go for a communist party meetings, how much ration cut is going to happen soon, what vegetables would be distributed the upcoming week. I no longer had to live in the suffocation of populated bamboo huts. I no longer had to follow crooked leaders in the hope of setting people free from their refugee lives but only to find they are worried about filling their own pockets. I no longer had to feel the humiliation and discrimination from local Nepalese 25 Writ Large Magazine

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people. I no longer will be chased while walking alone. I no longer had to be a subject of pity and empathy. I no longer had to fear from the communist folks. I no longer had to wait hopelessly to go back to Bhutan. I no longer had to have international communities like the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, World Food Program etc., worry about my basic needs like food, water, shelter, and education. I no longer had to attach the word “refugee” next to my name every time I speak about myself or write an application. I no longer had to have some one think about me anymore as if I am not capable of anything. I no longer have to be on the receiving-end all the time…and feel the pain that comes from receiving too much. I was journeying to be free, be on my own. But I did not know what was coming next, what life had to offer me ahead. I was headed towards a destination with little knowledge of it. I was stepping into the unknown but hoping for the best. That day changed my life in so many ways. It led me to the United States, where a life of challenge began again. But this time was indeed a journey toward a life of hope.

★★★

Ezekiel Edwards is the director of the ACLU’s Criminal Law Reform Project. Writ Large conducted an hour-long interview with him on the subject of mass-incarceration’s terrible racial disparities, prosecutorial overreach, and the erosion of rights in the United States. Edwards was effortlessly erudite in recounting the history of mass-incarceration and arcane details of case-law pertaining to the so-called “war on drugs.”

- Lucas Goren

On the history of mass-incarceration.

America has now, and has had for quite some time, the highest incarceration rate in the world and the most people in prison in the world.

While we tout ourselves to be the beacon of freedom and democracy we are also the leading carcirotory state on earth. And so that has prompted a lot of people to try and examine how that can be. Again we are talking, not just sheer numbers, we are talking rates as well. And while I think America has always tended to be a rather punitive country and certainly, as we know, has always been a country where racial inequality, racism and racial disparities have defined this country really since its inception. It’s manifested itself in incarceration rates most acutely in the past forty years. In the early 1970’s our total prison population was roughly 300,000 people.

Now our total incarceration rate is 2.2 million – I

haven’t checked the last few months. So, that’s an astronomical increase. It’s not that there weren’t racial disparities before, but I think they have been exacerbated, and the sheer number of people and communities affected by those disparities, and the severity with which they are affected has significantly grown. There are a number of reasons people think it has grown so drastically: the major ones are the war on drugs, which we started fighting in the early 70’s, really ratcheted up in the 80’s and 90’s, and so people who are using, possessing, distributing drugs were prosecuted much more aggressively and imprisoned much more aggressively. The number of crimes for which people can be arrested and sent to jail has grown both at the state and federal level.

The length of the sentences people have to serve for both violent, but also very much so for non-

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violent crimes, has increased dramatically. The amount of time, once people are sentenced, that they have to serve – meaning how much credit they can get for good behavior – has been reduced over those forty year. Parole and probation have expanded, with a strictness wherein even technical violations are enforced – which puts you back in prison. We’ve also had an expansion of the private prison industry, in terms of prisons and probations. We have asset forfeiture, so there’s a financial incentive to drive the police to stop people. So, now there’s much more money to be made in arresting and incarcerating people, or putting them in some sort of state supervision then there was ever before. And so I think those are a number of the reasons we have seen our prison system and our population explode.

On the curtailing of prisoners’ rights.

The ability for people to raise challenges to their convictions through, let’s say, writs of habeas corpus, or for prisoners to litigate their rights has been vastly curtailed by the courts and by legislation. We have simultaneously pushed many people into prison, for much longer, and then made it harder for any of them to raise various claims: be they technical legal claims or innocence claims to gain their freedom. And we’ve certainly know through the work of the innocence project and through DNA [testing] that errors are certainly not uncommon, even in the most serious of cases, you can only imagine what they would be in more “run of the mill cases.”

On prosecutorial abuse.

So on the prosecutor question, which raises something else I should have mentioned – as part of the longer sentences, came an influx of mandatory sentencing. They are referred to, in what sounds as a misnomer, as mandatory minimums. Misnomer because the word minimum implies that there could be something at the low end [laughs]: a minimum could be life without parole. So, what your minimum is, is that your floor could be very high it’s just not as high as what the ceiling is. And so mandatory minimum sentencing has played a significant role both in putting people in prison for much lon27 Writ Large Magazine

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ger – where judges hands’ are tied, and even for people whom they believe a twenty or thirty year sentence for a drug crime is inappropriate; they have no ability to deviate from that sentence.

They are the people who rubber-stamp it. The people that control that, to a large extent, are the legislature that passes sentencing laws, but also our prosecutors. Prosecutors wield, and have always wielded a lot of power, and you can read Supreme Court decisions from the 40’s where justices are commenting on the awesome and prone-to-abuse power that prosecutors possess.

But that power has grown quite a bit through mandatory minimums, so they control what they’re going to charge and how many times they are going to charge it and they are often allowed to pick apart alleged crimes so that each act can carry, let’s say, a certain mandatory minimum sentence, stack those in one charge and now suddenly someone is facing, let’s say, forty years.

That gives the prosecutors not only great leverage to put them in jail for forty years but to then offer them a plea to twenty or fifteen years, for a crime someone forty years ago would have been looking at probation for committing. Now people are taking pleas for 5, 10, or 15 years, because they realize that if they go to trial and are actually convicted at mandatory they are facing 40 or 50 or life in prison. It presents many defendants, guilty or innocent, with a rock and hard place.

And so, many people end up pleading guilty to these lengthy sentences. That’s a dynamic that has defined the last thirty years – particularly in federal court, but in state court as well – the way our justice system works. It really is up to the whim and inclinations of the prosecutor, who has free reign and is immune from lawsuits. Is not required to explain their decisions or how they use their discretion. And so that’s another driver – it becomes the game the prosecutor wants to play.

On racial disparities in prisons.

If one looks at the criminal justice system, there are a series of steps when one is brought into it. There’s contact with police, and what happens with that contact: are you frisked are you searched, are you arrested, are you brought to jail? And if you are brought to jail you are eventually brought to a judge or magistrate for a bail hearing. What happens there? Are you

incarcerated or not? How high is the bail? And then, what does the prosecutor decide to do with the case? Do they charge you? If so: with what?

Then there is the trial process and sentencing.

if you are white. That’s what the data plays out.

You can look at a lot of police and law enforcement as well as other actors in the criminal justice system as carrying with them, as we all do in different ways, various biases, many of which are racial biases. So where the police deploy, what they do once they’re deployed, how do they interact with a person based n the color of their skin, is largely driven by, I think, by race.

If you look at each of these pivots along the way there are racial disparities. There are racial disparities in stops, frisks, searches, charging, bail and length of sentencing. And it seems each time these are studied, whether on a more local We [the ACLU] did a report on marijuana arlevel or on a national level, when other things are rests last year that I was a lead author of, and we controlled for, the factor found that blacks were that seems to often speak Now people are taking pleas for 5, 10, or 15 four times as likely to the loudest is race. years, because they realize that if they go be arrested for marijuana possession as whites to trial and are actually convicted at manWhy is that the nationally, despite comcase? datory they are facing 40 or 50 or life in parable marijuana use. prison. It presents many defendants, guilty Well, there are a whole In some states they were or innocent, with a rock and hard place.

And range of answers, but eight times as likely and a simple one is that this in some counties thirty so, many people end up pleading guilty to country has deep seated times as likely. We did a these lengthy sentences. racial prejudice and bias report on people servthat comes out in sometimes explicit but oftening life without parole for nonviolent offenses times implicit ways. Sometimes people recognize and found that 65% percent of people serving sometimes they don’t. But each time you study where people of color despite making up 18% of these things, one of the things, if not the thing the total US population. We did a study on the driving these decisions is the race of the person. militarization of police in June, looking specifiAnd that’s just a fact. If you look at police decally at the federal programs that give military partments, in which extensive studies have been equipment and gear to local law enforcement done, what’s happening here is that people are free of charge. As well, the length of misdemeanbeing stopped and frisked, not because there is or sentences was longer for blacks than whites, any reasonable suspicion to stop and frisk them, with everything else controlled for. You can see as mandated by law, and not because they are this pattern over and over again. The evidence necessarily in a higher crime neighborhood – it’s seems overwhelming, and people will try and because of race. Certainly that disparity can be explain it away by saying “well, you know, blacks said to be because a person looks a certain way commit more crimes.” The point of these sophisor is in a certain community. Let’s say they are a ticated studies that are done empirically and peer community mostly composed of people of color, reviewed is that controlling for things like crime or there is a person of color in a majority white rates, race is what’s talking here. If you are in a neighborhood, that could determine it. If you low crime neighborhood you are more likely to look at traffic stop data from around the country, be stopped if you are black. If you are in a high the chances that you are going to be stopped as a crime neighborhood you are more likely to be person of color, particularly as an African Amerstopped if you are black. ican, are significantly higher. If for nothing else It’s disturbing, but I don’t think if you are a than your being a person of color. The chances student of America and American history, it’s not that you are going to be frisked and searched particularly shocking. There has been unequal because of the color of your skin are much highlaw enforcement, and the laws have been applied er. The chances that the police are going to find selectively in this country for, really, forever. contraband on you, in study after study, is higher 2014/’15

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O UT

of

His Element

by John Ingersoll

F

or Gary Scott, 2013 was a true year of discovery and transformation. For the first time ever, he used a smart phone, surfed the web, and used GPS technology to help himself get around. Perhaps even more significant, 2013 also marked his first date and his first time behind the wheel of a car. These accomplishments would be modest for a typical teenager in America today. Gary Scott, however, is not a teenager: he is a thirty-one year old living in Oakland, California. And he certainly is not typical, having spent half of his teen years and all of his twenties isolated from the regular world. Gary Scott is not from another planet; so how did he manage to make it past his thirty-first birthday without having experiences that are typically the province of teenagers?

Simple: when Gary Scott was a teenager, he agreed to help a fellow gang member commit a crime that ended with the death of the intended robbery victim. At fifteen years old, Scott was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison.

Like many states, California permits prosecutors to charge and try defendants as young as fourteen in the adult court system, making them subject to the same punishment as defendants over the age of eighteen. The only exception is that even juveniles charged and convicted as adults are not subject to the death penalty as the United States Supreme Court has ruled it “cruel and unusual punishment� to execute a juvenile, regardless of the crime. Despite this ruling, it is still currently permissible for a juvenile to be sentenced to life, including life 29 Writ Large Magazine

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without the possibility of parole, when convicted of certain aggravated crimes. Technically, juveniles can be sent to adult prison when they reach sixteen years of age; however, California has adopted a practice of holding juveniles tried and convicted as adults in the juvenile justice system until they turn eighteen.

Indeed, this is what happened to Gary Scott: after three years in a juvenile facility awaiting his eighteenth birthday, he was transferred to a maximum security adult prison to serve the remainder of his sentence. Initially, he was sent to Calipatria State Prison in Imperial County, about 50 miles north of the California-Mexico border, the first of three prisons at which he would serve time.

After spending eight years in prison, Gary Scott was transferred to one of the most notorious prisons in the United States, San Quentin State Prison, the oldest prison in California and the only one in the state with a death chamber. Among the over 4,000 inmates at San Quentin, Gary Scott encountered a small number of young men with whom he shared something in common: each of them had been convicted of murder as teenagers and sentenced to life. Numbering seventeen in total, these juvenile lifers decided to petition the prison administration for approval to form a group called “Kid C.A.T.,” which would be comprised exclusively of prisoners who committed murder between the ages of thirteen and seventeen and had been incarcerated in adult prisons since the age of eighteen. The name of the group refers to the age the inmates were when they committed their crime (“Kid”), with “C.A.T.” standing for “creating awareness together.” Across the United States, there are dozens of organizations that advocate for the elimination of laws that permit juveniles to be sentenced to life sentences. For Kid C.A.T., however, this was not the focus of their group or the rationale for forming the group. They did not come together to rail against the injustice of juveniles being tried as adults or advocate for changes to sentencing laws for juveniles. Nor did they seek absolution or attempt to mitigate their responsibility for their crimes based on their family structure, social or economic status, or any other factor.

Instead, the formation of Kid C.A.T. was driven by a more personal search for self-understanding and growth on the part of the juvenile lifers. In rehabilitative or restorative justice discussions, the focus is

often on the importance of helping offenders reform themselves so that they can lead a more productive life when they are released from prison. For many of the members of Kid C.A.T., parole was a distant, and in some cases non-existent, dream, as some of them had prison sentences upwards of 40-50 years (the longest sentence being 104 years). Faced with many years of incarceration, the Kid C.A.T. lifers could easily have succumbed to the numbing reality of being an inmate, and allowed their identity to be “inmate,” “convict,” or even “murderer.” However, they each reached a powerful realization: that they wanted their lives to matter, that they wanted to be better people, even in prison. This realization, of course, does not happen overnight, and the lifers likely took different personal journeys to reach this realization, helped in many cases by a program in San Quentin known as Victim Offender Education Group. For all, however, the journey to the realization “my life matters” has a critical commonality: the commitment to take accountability and responsibility for what they did and the impact it had on their victims and their families.

“

when Gary Scott was a teenager, he agreed to help a fellow gang member commit a crime that ended with the death of the intended robbery victim

”

In 2012, the young men of Kid C.A.T. partnered with the non-profit group The Jejunity Foundation to film their individual stories and talk about their own journeys of self-realization. In the presence of a film crew, they faced the camera and talked about their crimes in a raw and unfiltered manner – what happened, how it felt, what went wrong. They acknowledged the devastation that they wrought on their victims and their families. For all of them, it would mark the first and only time they shared in detail the specifics of the crimes that resulted in their life sentences. “The person I became the day I caught my crime is not the person my mother raised,” says Antoine, one of the inmates serving a life sentence. Speaking directly into the camera, Mike T. says: “I’m not the same person I was eighteen years ago, September 30, 1993 …” One after 2014/’15

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the other, the inmates tell their stories; the date of their crime as well as the naked truth about what they did. As they tell their stories, they refused to resort to euphemisms (“I took a life”) or hide behind the passive voice (“someone was killed”).

As Ke Lam says simply: “I murdered another teenager by the name of Robbie.” In great, and sometimes graphic, detail, they speak about their crimes.

None of the Kid C.A.T. members seeks to excuse themselves, or justify their actions. Their purpose in facing the camera, and telling their story, is to stand up and take accountability for what they did. Charlie, who is serving a sentence of twenty-six years to life, states firmly: “The things that I’m gonna say are in no way an excuse for the actions and the things I’ve done in my life.” Similarly, another explains “I’m not here to convince anyone of my innocence, but to take responsibility and accountability for my actions.” Several of the lifers talk about the victims and their families, with one of them noting that he found out his victim was “the only son.” What the members of Kid C.A.T. have concluded is that only by confronting their past, and taking ownership of their actions, did they stand a chance of claiming an identity beyond that of “murderer.” In tears, one of the inmates says he “decided I’m not going to be that person anymore.” It has been a remarkable journey for these young men – from teenager, to convicted murderer, to inmate, to, ultimately, men, and men who want to stand for something other than the things they have done.

Following the intensely emotional day of filming, the men of Kid C.A.T., including Gary, were raw and overwhelmed by the experience of opening themselves up and sharing in such depth. So much so, in fact, that some of the group wanted to have all of the footage of their session destroyed.

Showing weakness in prison is a dangerous move that can have life-threatening consequences, as evidenced by the four-inch scar running down the face of one of the Kid C.A.T. members. In front of cameras, memorialized on film, each of these convicted murderers broke down, sobbing in tears, sharing their regrets, their shame, and talking about their fears, hurt and vulnerabilities. Inside the walls of San Quentin, this was an open invi31 Writ Large Magazine

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tation for abuse at the hands of other prisoners.

For several days, a debate raged within the group about what to do – destroy, or preserve. Ultimately, the group reached a consensus that their stories had too much potential power to influence other young men and should not be destroyed. In fact, the Kid C.A.T. members have been working with the Jejunity Foundation to create a feature-length documentary out of their stories to influence young people to avoid a life path that ends with senseless tragedy and loss.

This documentary, titled “Crying Sideways,” is a testament to the inner journey and search for transformation that each of the Kid C.A.T. members has undertaken. Remarkably, much of the technical work on the documentary -- filming and recording the interviews, photography, sound, lighting, and editing – has been provided by inmates themselves. Within the walls of the prison, there is a media department (San Quentin Media Labs) and equipment that inmates have used to help the documentary team pull together over forty hours of footage into a compelling story.

Gary Scott is still the only member of Kid C.A.T. to be paroled. Today, he continues on his personal journey to grow into a man that is not defined simply by an action that he took when he was fifteen years old. Now on parole, Gary wears “a few different hats,” as he likes to put it. A significant portion of his “giving back” effort is the full time job he has at Westside Community Services, a community-based mental health agency where he is a peer liaison working with youth and using his experience to help counsel teens to make better choices. Outside of work, Gary is also involved in working with juveniles on various restorative justice topics, and post-release he has co-founded a restorative justice council.

The Jejunity Project continues to work on the documentary, with working title “Crying Sideways: When Children Kill.” More information can be found on their website: www.jejunityproject.org They will be launching a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds to complete the documentary and distribute across the United States.

An interview with Mark Warren Mark Warren is Associate Professor of the Department of Public Policy and Public Affairs in the McCormack Graduate School. He is a sociologist concerned with the revitalization of American democratic and community life. He studies efforts to strengthen institutions that anchor low-income communities— schools, congregations and other community-based organizations—and to build broad-based alliances among these institutions and across race and social class.

Writ Large sat down with Professor Warren for an interview on poverty, education, grass-roots movements, and solutions to these pressing problems.

What is structural poverty?

So a lot of people in this country think people are poor because of their own lack of initiative to take advantage of opportunities. And that may be because of the families they are born into, but that is seen as a real individual problem. And the idea of structural inequality is to say that the way that our institutions operate in this country caste certain people into poverty and it is very difficult for people to get out of it. We are in an era right now where poor people have the least amount of opportunities to escape from poverty than they’ve had in the last eighty years or so. These institutions would be our educational system; so if you are born and you grow up in a poor community then you are going to attend a school that is underfunded with less qualified teachers that operate in ways that produce educational failure; so your chances of graduating in a poor community are about 50/50. But then you are also facing inadequate housing. And why is that? It is because our institutions of public housing have not invested in them, we have disinventesed in them. So take the ways that our educational system segregates – via residential segregation and our economic systems – and then you could talk about our criminal justice systems, which operate together to lock people in the system of poverty.

And a lot of my work focuses on young people.

What does it mean to be born into a poor family in a poor community? You know, your structure of opportunities are very much against you.

Schools, the housing, the violence in your communities are all products of structural inequality in our society and unless we are willing to tackle them on a structural level then I don’t think small scale, individually-oriented solutions are going to work.

And how does that effect education?

We have a lot of educational failure but that is not destiny. That can be changed, but it will take a whole-scale social movement that commits our society to real change and invests significant public resources into our schools and to our communities. And there was a time when that happened. We had a civil rights movement, a large scale social movement that eventually won the support of mainstream America and as a result our federal government invested tremendously in public education and anti-poverty programs and as a result poor children and African American children started doing significantly better in schools. And we went through a period in the 2014/’15

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sixties and seventies of rapid increase in student outcome and then we hit the eighties where there was a significant rollback. So we stopped investing so much in education. You can see it particularly in states like California that went from number one in public investment to towards the bottom like number forty or something like that. But you can see it in the federal government cutting back on urban programs, and ending a number of different policies. So we retracted and retrenched some of those commitments, which was scored on standardized tests like the national assessment of education progress. It’s interesting that if you track these scores, we had progress in the sixties and seventies and essentially a leveling off since that time, and that is the big picture of it. If anything, we had growing inequality along economic lines.

Those test scores are now, it seems, strictly dileneated by economic lines. If you do take into account or separate those test scores by racial and economic lines, in some ways they are thriving and in other ways they are completely lagging behind a sector of its population.

the problems of our educational systems by only looking at education on its own. The educational failure, the way I was talking about it, it’s a structural problem, meaning that it is not just a problem of our educational system. Although it is a problem our educational system, but it’s how our educational system fits into a whole institutional pattern that’s creating these kind of outcomes for young people. And so, we need to focus on our educational system, but we also need to focus on investing in the economic opportunities for the families—the parents of kids who go to school.

We need to focus on the quality of life, and the neighborhoods that children live in in terms of violence, and environmental justice issues. So there’s a whole range of things, that if we really want to produce or—help cultivate, if that’s a better way to put it—healthy, successful young people who are successful in school, and successful in their lives, then we need to be addressing this question much more holistically.

“

If you compare it to international scores, the United States is not doing all that well on averWe had a civil rights movement, a age. But our more affluent students are doing large scale social movement that extremely well and our low-income students are eventually won the support of doing extremely badly. The US has a very high mainstream America and as a result percentage of population that are children that our federal government invested are living in or near poverty. And these numbers tremendously in public education are shocking. And people don’t really understand and anti-poverty programs this. There are debates to define “near poverty” so if you use 200 percent of the poverty level and you grow up in a family of four and you are earning less than 38,000 a year then you are near poverty and that is nearly fifty percent for all black children in this country and same with Can racial inequality be perpetuated by curriculum Latino’s. And if you use 150% of the poverty line choices? you are getting at around forty percent, so these are use numbers. And the sheer number living in Yeah, I think there’s some evidence that. You poverty is about 25%. So these are huge proporknow, if you looked at the development of new tions. Most of the countries we are comparing kinds of curriculum, for example, what does it ourselves with, so-called “advanced industrial mean for a school system that has well resourced, countries”, don’t have anywhere near that perhigh-qualified teachers and children coming centage of childhood poverty. We rank near the from communities with much better quality top. So what I’ve been trying to argue against of life? They’re going to benefit from the new is the idea that somehow we are going to solve curriculum. What I talk about in my research

”

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are the of racial stereotypes that exist here too.

Hypothetically, if our kids can’t really learn at a high level, so you give them a new curriculum, but you don’t give them the resources to implement it, and you don’t think it’s going to really work anyway: then the results of that are often disappointing, and that’s why I was saying I think, technical solutions can lead to growing inequality. I mean, there have been debates about charter schools around this too. There’s an inequality that’s existing when –particularly in the larger scale charter systems where greater resources start going to the charter schools – they teach fewer special needs children, fewer English language learners. So even within our urban system, we’re starting to have a two-tiered system with charter schools, and regular public schools.

Something that we see in places like Philadelphia and Chicago. It hasn’t really come to Boston at that level yet, although there’s some discussion about that. And I think some charter schools can be good. I’m not against all of them, but I think if you’re approaching it as a solution to the problems of public education, then I think it’s very problematic, and it’s likely to lead to greater inequality.

Are there racial dynamics in play as well?

Thinking about it in terms of educational failures, part of the reason is that we don’t invest in the resources in our schools. And that comes out in so many different kinds of ways, in terms of the standard of teachers who are there, as well as books, as well as the physical space. But, we also have a teaching force that harbors a lot of the same racial stereotypes, and anti-poor stereotypes that are in the society as a whole. So there’s a lot of evidence that teachers stereotype kids. And, partly that takes the form of low expectations – “these are kids that you can’t really expect that much from them,” and that becomes a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. There’s a lot of research on that. Or on the discipline issue: when young black boys are running around and acting out, it’s about disciplining them, rather than about understanding why people might be doing that and having more positive approaches to do it. Thus, what happens is we have these harsh

disciplinary codes; and kids are suspended at a young age, or labeled at a young age; and then they end up being more likely to be expelled, or to drop out of school; and then they end up out on the streets; and then since they don’t have a high-school degree, their job prospects aren’t that great. So, they’re still on the streets, where they’re subject to police harassment, or maybe they get into criminal activity as well; but for whatever reason they are led into the criminal justice system. So that’s the sort of school-toprison pipeline idea, but part of what’s driving that pipeline is the stereotypes that happen to kids from very young ages. I’m talking about age three or four, and going on up. You know, black children are three times more likely to be suspended from school due to subjective reasons.

How can we change this?

So even at older ages, a lot of grassroots movements have tried to say we need to stop suspending kids for willful defiance because that is completely subjective: if you want to suspend a child for carrying a weapon in school, that is a little more objective. Although there are debates about that because kids have been suspended for bringing butter knives to school. There are certainly categories that are more objective than others, and willful defiance is a huge, completely subjective category.

And all the evidence shows it falls along racial lines, and it is not surprising because we are living in a society that for the most part demonizes black men. And we see it in the Trayvon Martin case and more recently the Ferguson case, and these are just the tip of the iceberg of things that reflect the attitudes that are deep seated in society because we see it played out on a daily basis in classrooms.

What changes these kinds of attitudes? One of the things, one of the most powerful ways stereotypes have been changed against marginalized populations are through social movements of people organizing and demanding change, and the civil rights movement is a perfect example of that, of black people asserting their humanity and who they are.

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Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean, Tears, idle tears, I know not what they Tears from the depth of some divine d s from the depth of some divine despair Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes, in the heart, and gather to the eyes, In looking on the happy Autumn-fields, ng on the happy Autumn-fields, And thinking of the days that are no more. e days that are no more.

e tears, I know not what they mean, Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean, e depth of some divine despair Tears from the depth of some divine despair eart, and gather to the eyes, Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes, happy Autumn-fields, In looking on the happy Autumn-fields, at are noidle more.

And thinking the mean, days that are no more.

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ears from the depth of some divine despair n the heart, and gather thetears, eyes, I know not Tears,toidle Tears, whatidle theytears, mean, I know not what they mean, ng on the happy Autumn-fields, Tears from the depth of some despair Tears from divine the depth of some divine despair he days that are no more.

Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes, Rise thehappy heart,Autumn-fields, and gather to the eyes, In looking oninthe In thinking looking the happy Autumn-fields, Tears, idleAnd tears, I knowon what they mean, ofnot the days that are no more.

Andthe thinking days that despair are no more.

Tears from depth of of the some divine - Alfred Lord Tennyson “Tears, Idle Tears” Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes, In looking on the happy Autumn-fields, And thinking of the days that are no more.

ears, idle tears, I know not what they mean, s from the depth of some divine despair Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean, Tears from the depth of some divine despair e heart, and gather to the eyes, Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes, n the happy Autumn-fields, In looking on the happy Autumn-fields, days that are no more.

And thinking of the days that are no more.

Tears, idle tears, I know not what Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,Tears from the depth of some Tears from the depth of some divine despair Rise in the heart, and gather In looking on the happy AuRise 35inWritthe and gather to the eyes, Large heart, Magazine 2014/’15 looking on the happy Autumn-fields, And thinking of the days that are

sad, bro?

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Rates of depression have risen in the last decades among college students, and studies suggest that 53% of college students report being depressed at some point during their time as students. This is neither news, nor is it surprising given the crushing stress that some students feel to excel academically. In this article, I am going to address depression among male college students, specifically. Dealing with feelings can be a difficult challenge, especially for us guys. My father might as well be Stoey the stoic face from the land of grunts and nods; feelings were not talked about in my house. And for all the emphasis placed on feelings and emotions, the male cultural narrative seems to dictate that we suck it up and move on. While I am all about that (given that I would rather eat a fistful of chalk than talk about my feelings), I am also a psychology research nerd, and the data indicate that “sucking it up” doesn’t work so well. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that while more women report having suicidal thoughts and making plans to commit suicide than men, men account for 79% of all suicides among 15-24 year-olds. Because of the rigid gender roles of our society, men are at especially high risk for not seeking treatment for depressive symptoms, and are thus more likely

to suffer in silence, use maladaptive coping skills such as binge drinking, and to commit suicide.

This article addresses the limitations in identifying male depression in both the clinical and interpersonal realms, identifying what depression might look like in men as opposed to women, and what we can do as a community to identify and address depression among male college students.

While there are many different types of depressive disorders identified in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fifth edition (DSM), when people talk about depression or being depressed, they are usually referencing what in the DSM is labeled major depressive disorder, and periods of depression are called major depressive episodes. I am not going to go through all the criteria because of limitations on length, and also because people have a tendency to identify with diagnostic criteria and immediately think that they have the disorder (if you really want to indulge your hypochondriac side, I suggest visiting WebMD). The hallmarks, however, include subjectively reported depressed mood most of the day (sad, empty, hopeless), fatigue, feelings of worthlessness, trouble concentrating, and experiencing decreased pleasure with activities that were once pleasurable. These criteria are arbitrary, 2014/’15

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however, because the experience of depression— or the state of being depressed—might be different for different people.

While, according to the American Psychiatric Association, the prevalence of depression among women is reported to be 1.5 to 3 times that of men, there is evidence that diagnostic and screening tools might be, by design, more apt to detect depression in women than in men, given that women are socialized to have a more robust emotional vocabulary. Indeed, the Beck Depression Inventory II measures the intensity of depression by answering in the affirmative one of four possible choices of twenty-one descriptive criteria.

The majority of these are “feelings” criteria— worthlessness, self-criticalness, sadness, indecisiveness—but only a few are about behavior (agitation, difficulty concentrating, loss of interest in sex), and so women are more likely to be able to relate to the questions, given that terms pertaining to emotion are a larger part of their vernacular.

While binge drinking is not an unusual activity in college, the lines get blurred as to whether the motivation to drink is social in nature, or also encompasses an aspect of maladaptive coping.

The literature on the topic is mixed: some say that female college students are more likely to drink in response to stress and depression, whereas others report more problem-`drinking among men in response to stress and depression. It is well theorized that depression among men is underreported, and therefore all these reports needed to be considered within a wider context. A 2013 study by the University of North Dakota found that, in using a path analysis as their statistical model, binge drinking was positively and directly associated with depression in male college students. Before we have our “Ah ha!” moment, remember that positive relationships do not mean they are causal; they mean simply that there is an association between the two. For instance, are these college students drinking because they are depressed, or are they depressed because the social atmosphere

Studies have indicated that the outward appearance of depression in men often comes in the form of angry outbursts and impatience, and also takes the form of maladaptive coping mechanisms such as binge drinking.

I want to make it clear that this article in no way is suggesting that all men lack the vocabulary to convey their emotional state, nor do I think all men are unwilling to report when they are feeling depressed. However, many men lack the tools to convey their emotional state through language.

This speaks to me personally, given that a good portion of my male friends come to me when they’re having a bad day. They are more likely to identify feeling angry or annoyed with other people, and to talk about staying up all night playing video games and eating potato chips. Studies have indicated that the outward appearance of depression in men often comes in the form of angry outbursts and impatience, and also takes the form of maladaptive coping mechanisms such as binge drinking.

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of their institution revolves heavily around drinking? One of the subtypes of depressive disorders is substance/medication-induced depressive disorder. My thought is that, like in many instances with psychological disorders, a cycle erupts.

In the case of binge drinking, alcohol and social binge-drinking might be used as a buffer against stress and depression, but given its short term effectiveness, maladaptive coping mechanisms like drinking tend to make things worse. If the behavior continues and the student starts to decline academically and notices disruptions in social circles such as family or relations with friends, this might reinforce the negative-self talk that accompanies depression, and establish a belief system marked by hopelessness, worthlessness, inappropriately placed guilt, and believing that they are unable to

perform as a productive individual in society.

The rate of attempted suicide among male college students was higher than among women, with 1.6% of men reporting an attempted suicide in the last twelve months, as opposed to 1.5% of women.

pleted suicide among men being four times that of women in this age group, one might conclude that there is a significant problem in the reporting and recognizing of psychological disturbances in men.

Solving the problem of recognizing and intervening in the course of depression among male college students needs to be tackled at the institutional level of the college, the intervention-model level of practitioners and researchers, and at the interpersonal level among peers. Chances are, friends are likely to be the first to notice sympAlthough binge drinking and some uncomforttoms of depression when it comes to men. Men able feelings of depression might seem par for (and this is a generalization) are adept at keeping the course in the modern college experience, secrets, especially when it comes to suffering from the increase in college student psychological feelings of depression and stress. It is not within disturbances and suicide has risen sharply in the the confines of the male gender role to show or last few years. The National Survey of College talk about feelings, so friends are the most likeCounseling 2012 reported that of a sample of ly to notice strange deviations in behavior that 293 university counseling centers, 92% reported might otherwise go unnoticed. Peers are charged an increase in students seeking help for mental with the uncomfortable task of confronting health issues over the past few years. It should be their friends about the cause of their change in noted that at least a portion of that might be due behavior. Public health messaging by the instituto the increased societal acceptance of seeking tion geared toward men could increase rates of help for mental health issues. However, a signifiself-reporting, and earlier intervention is almost cantly larger portion is seen as due to the increase always associated with better outcomes. In terms in stress, and the overall context of education of the psychiatric community as a whole, more being directly proportional to social class. In a research needs to be done in terms of recognizing 2013 survey of 32,655 male college students by different behavioral patterns of men that might the American College Health Association, 49.3% indicate levels of depression. New measurement reported feeling lonely, 74.2% reported feeling tools adapted to reflect the emotional vocabulary overwhelmed by all they had to do, and 27.2% re- of men need to be developed and tested for reliported feeling so depressed that they found it dif- ability and validity. Colleges and universities are ficult to function. Moreover, the rate of attempted often the breeding ground for dramatic change suicide among male college students was higher that finds its way into mainstream society, and than among women, with 1.6% of men reporting the institutions themselves have a responsibility to an attempted suicide in the last twelve months, face it head-on. as opposed to 1.5% of women. While 1/10th of one percent seems insignificant, it should be noted that on every other mental health measure, women reported significantly higher affirmative rates, particularly those of which were more associated with feelings-based vocabulary. For instance, 57.3 % of female college students as opposed to 39.7% of males reported feeling overwhelmed with anxiety. The sadness scale found that 65.7% of females felt sad in the last 12 months, as opposed to 50.4% of males. Given the disparity in these numbers, coupled with the higher rate of com2014/’15

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