Bodies

Washington U niversity

POLITICAL REVIEW 28.2 | February 2018 | wupr.org

TABLE OF CONTENTS 7

Good Sex Ed is Rare—and Necessary

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Kirk Brown

Annie Johnston

BODIES 8

Beyond Beauty

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Boundless Bodies: Toxic Chemicals in Sarah Greenberg

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Hanna Khalil

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The Reality of the Fake News Hysteria Conor Smyth

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Don't Lose the Fights You Pick Daniel Smits

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I Support Israel. The Jerusalem Capitol Declaration Was Wrong Ryan Mendelson

Who Will Take Care of the Homeless?

Ishaan Shah

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Profit, Self-Worth, and the Ugly Side of the Beauty Industry

World Order and American Interest Yumeng Zou

Why All Drugs Should Be Legal Connor Warshauer

INTERNATIONAL

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Everyday Places

NATIONAL

The Cultural Revolution, Forgotten Jacob Finke

Sienna Ruiz

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What is Ours is Not Yours

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The Resurrection of Former Communist

The Promise of Better Sex Ed

Leaders

Hanna Khalil

Luke Voyles

A Timeline of Challenges and Progess in Addressing HIV/AIDS Max Lichtenstein

EDITORS' NOTE Editors-in-Chief:

Dear Reader,

Rachel Butler Dan Sicorsky Executive Director: Sam Klein Staff Editors: Sophie Attie Max Handler Daniel Smits Katelyn Taira Features Editors: Hanna Khalil Max Lichtenstein Finance Director: Adya Jain Director of Design: Dominique Senteza Assistant Directors of Design: Maggie Chuang Maddy Angstreich Web Editor: Nicholas Kinberg Director of External Operations: Josh Hill Programming Director: Liza Sivriver

Observe your head. Move on to your shoulders. Next, your knees and your toes.

All yours, right? Yet it might seem strange to you, just as it did to us, that people may not have sole jurisdiction over even their bodies. We are not—at least not to the extent we pretend we are—the rulers of our own temples. So many others, from legislators and doctors, to police officers and farmers, make decisions every day that touch our bodies and our minds.

For this issue, we invited writers and artists to address bodies—theirs, yours, everyone’s. The #MeToo movement and debates over abortion and gender are among the modern issues that feature bodies in central roles. In the political sphere, questions are swirling: Does the government have the right to police our bodies through surveillance? What should we do about healthcare? Who do we blame when our soil and water are polluted?

Our contributors dove into these questions and others. Sarah Greenberg writes about our reluctance to give up the dangerous chemicals most of us use on a daily basis. Ishaan Shah argues for giving hospitals greater control over their payment systems, as this move could actually increase affordable housing for the homeless. Writing about our culture’s focus on physical beauty, Sienna Ruiz comments on how even an inclusive definition of beauty falls short of empowering women.

Other writers and artists deal with topics ranging from sex ed to drug legalization.

We also feature writing on broader national and international topics. In the National section, Conor Smyth argues that the impact of fake news is overblown, and Yumeng Zou writes about the U.S.’s overarching foreign policy strategy. In the International section, Luke Voyles writes about past Communist leaders’ attempts at political comebacks.

We hope that the next time you visit a pharmacy, jog on a treadmill, or go to bed, you consider how our bodies, though just bones and flesh, are truly and powerfully political.

Front Cover: Neema Samawi

Warmly,

Theme Spread:

Rachel Butler & Dan Sicorsky Editors-in-Chief

Thomas Fruhauf Feature Designs: Maggie Chuang Maddy Angstreich Dominique Senteza

WU POLITICAL REVIEW | BODIES

THE FACES OF WUPR

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GOOD SEX ED IS RARE—AND NECESSARY Annie Johnston | Photo courtesy of Pixaby

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didn’t realize how much I took my sex education for granted until I came to Wash U. I went to a loosely Christian-affiliated school in Minneapolis, where puberty education was a part of sixth grade health, and we moved into sexual education in grade seven. A few weeks of health class were devoted to sex ed in grades seven, eight, and nine. For me, the experience was slightly uncomfortable, but it wasn’t traumatic or fear-based. We learned about the potential risks, including the implications of pregnancy, but also discussed safe and protected sex.

We spent a considerable amount of time learning about many different forms of birth control and some of their benefits and problems.

Although abstinence was listed as a birthcontrol method, the conversation was more focused on safe sex than on trying to convince us not to have it. We practiced putting condoms on bananas and learned how to properly use female condoms. We learned about oral contraception. My teacher taught us about the morning-after pill and told us where to find it. There were forums to ask anonymous questions, and for the most part that worked pretty well. Never once, in three years, did any of my teachers make sex sound shameful. Certainly my school has room for improvement: We could do a much better job of being inclusive of all sexualities and increasing our emphasis on consent. However, I did not realize how much these faults paled in comparison to much of the country.

Until recently, I thought that was normal. I didn’t realize that only 24 states require sex education in public schools. According to the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization devoted to promoting sexual and reproductive rights, only 13 states necessitate that sex education be medically accurate if it’s provided. There are 26 states that mandate that the information be age-appropriate, and only two states that prohibit the programs from promoting religion.

The most common criteria is that parents are allowed to prevent their children from learning the material; this is the case in 36 states. Thirtynine states required that abstinence be included, and in 27 states it must be stressed. Only 20

When students don’t learn about sex through educational programs, many of them find the information in other ways. states even require that condoms or contraception be covered in the material. There are states where the content centers around the importance of only having sex after marriage, and lessons stress the negative outcomes of teen sex.

Finally, in Arizona, it is illegal for public schools to “promote [a] homosexual lifestyle,” and in Oklahoma, schools must teach that gay sex is “considered to be responsible for contact with the AIDS virus.”

I have friends who didn’t know what a condom was until they got to college. I had a friend who, as part of her sex ed program, had to spin a wheel and each section was one of the possible things that could go wrong if you have sex. These kinds of experiences are traumatic, and perpetuate the stigma surrounding sex in the United States.

Abstinence-only sex education does not reduce the amount of sex people have, but it does make it less safe. In fact, multiple studies show that comprehensive sex ed actually lowers the rate of teen sex, STIs, and pregnancy.

When students don’t learn about sex through education programs, many of them find the information in other ways. Unfortunately, the ways that friends, the media, pop culture, and porn portray sex is not always healthy or positive.

Because of common sex myths, people receive misinformation about condoms, expectations, and consent. The way that sex is portrayed virtually never emphasizes protection. Without hearing about it from somewhere else, it could very easily seem like forms of protection are relatively unimportant. There are very few, if any, movies or TV shows where the characters were planning on having sex but chose not to because they didn’t have a condom. Pop culture also creates expectations for how soon to have sex and what it will be like, that are often unrealistic. It’s hard to find any mention of consent in these sources. It’s not that these are inherently wrong ways of talking about sex, but they are not meant to be the foundation of people’s sex education.

States need to require comprehensive sex ed.

Schools need to provide education on contraceptives and consent. We need to create dialogue that is not only about heterosexual sex.

We need to teach people the risks of having sex, in a productive way, and also how to minimize those risks, rather than just teaching abstinence. We need to have ways that students can feel comfortable voicing their questions.

Fundamentally, we as a larger culture need to start talking about sex, and it needs to start with proper education in schools.

Annie Johnston ‘21 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. She can be reached at annie.johnston@ wustl.edu.

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MOVING BEYOND BEAUTY Sienna Ruiz | Illustration by Natalie Snyder

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n the surface, the notion that “everyone is beautiful” seems like a harmless, all-inclusive phrase that can do nothing but empower women who must contend daily with all-too-restrictive beauty standards.

However, this idea serves to further trap women in an obsession with their physicality and simply widens the net for personal care companies to manipulate consumers into a damaging reliance on their products.

A critical view on this idea is essential to understanding how women remain confined by feminine ideals under the guise of being freed from them. Even though “everyone is beautiful” seems uplifting, it maintains attractiveness as the all-important standard of a woman’s worth.

Whereas, say, five years ago, ads were populated only by thin white women, now models of all shapes, sizes, and colors fill the screen; Aeries’ latest #aeriereal campaign features models of various sizes and claims, “No retouching. Body positivity. Girl Power,” while the skincare company Glossier announces, “Beauty inspired by real life.” The soap and shampoo brand Dove has a statement that takes the cake: on its website Dove states that it is “the home of real beauty. For over a decade, we’ve been working to make beauty a source of confidence, not anxiety…Beauty is not defined by shape, size or color – it’s feeling like the best version of yourself.

Authentic. Unique. Real.”

By using modern feminist language of body positivity, Dove and companies like it transition to more individualistic measures of appearance that nevertheless have to be discovered and maintained, thus manufacturing a cycle of insecurity that can only be temporarily eased by more and more purchases. Therefore, this apparently positive framework continues to instill shame in women, and it is this shame that corporations prey upon, albeit with more subtle marketing strategies than in the past. This obsession with authenticity and the connection between beauty and identity proves that Dove’s goal of anxiety-less beauty is impossible; in fact, beauty is anxiety and these brands rely on women’s endless self-policing of their appearance. In the past, women felt the need to buy products

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because they do not look a certain way; now, those “impossible beauty standards” have been

Is it possible to divorce our sense of self from our “look,” to solidify and define this sense without clothes, makeup, or hairstyles? replaced by achievable ones that still require these products to realize.

Some may still ask where the harm is in this type of marketing – after all, is it not great that women of all shapes, sizes, and colors now have the opportunity to see themselves represented and valued where they had historically been excluded? While I do not deny the power in representation, I do push back against the suggestion that a woman’s value primarily lies in her physical looks because a perpetual focus on the external leads to a weaker sense of self that severely affects how women interact with the world. In this internet age, this stress is particularly acute for women­—at any moment, a candid picture or Snapchat could be taken of you that you want to look good for, or you may want to commemorate an event online, requiring a perfect photo opportunity that shows you at your best angle. The constant maintenance of an image is not just a modern problem for women; in Virginia Woolf’s 1927 novel To the Lighthouse, one of the main characters, an older woman named Mrs. Ramsay who represents the Victorian ideals for women, spends so much time existing for others that “there was scarcely a shell of herself left for her to know herself by; all was so lavished and spent” and makes people question whether there was

anything behind her “beauty and splendor”: they wonder, “[is] there nothing? nothing but an incomparable beauty which she lived behind, and could do nothing to disturb?”. Although highly regarded for her beauty and sensibility, her emptiness still resonates with women today. How much of our days are spent worrying about how we look for others? Is it possible to divorce our sense of self from our “look” to solidify and define this sense without clothes, makeup, or hairstyles? Constantly maintaining a presentation for others is exhausting and distracts from meaningful self-improvement, whether this is the performance of “the best version of yourself” as Dove claims or the adherence to conventional beauty standards.

A debate over whether or not every woman is beautiful is not the point. A focus on appearance upholds a destructive preoccupation with appearance and allows companies to continue to foster a dependence on their products. We should not expand the definition of beauty, for we must do away with the value of beauty.

Rather, we should expand the definition of womanhood to extend beyond the body, beyond the upkeep of an image that only serves to diminish instead of empower.

Sienna Ruiz ‘20 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. She can be reached at sienna.ruiz@wustl.edu.

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BOUNDLESS BODIES: TOXIC CHEMICALS IN EVERYDAY PLACES Sarah Greenberg | Illustration by Neema Samawi

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woman loses both her legs in the aftermath of tampon-induced Toxic Shock Syndrome. A child suffers brain damage years after innocently biting a lead-painted toy.

A man spends nineteen days on a ventilator after waterproofing his boots.

We hear these stories on the news, but quickly tune them out. Our apathetic attitudes seem rational. In a world plagued by social injustices and political catfights, a report divulging the cancer-inducing components of your favorite lotion shrinks in importance. Yet, how can you be sure the next big headline will not be about you?

Our bodies are our most personal possession; we therefore ought to understand how our bodies interact with the world. In Bodily Natures: Science, Environment and Material Self, Stacy Alaimo explores the interconnection between human bodies and nonhuman natures, including ecological systems, chemical agents, and other actors. She refers to human corporeality as “trans-corporeality,” which emphasizes that humanity is intermeshed with the morethan-human world. Trans-corporeality implores humans to think across bodies as part of an interconnected system. It forges the “human” with the “environment.”

To understand trans-corporeality more clearly, consider the porosity of bodies. In Labadie,

Missouri, a town located next to a coal-fired power plant, the community experienced a spike in lung related health problems. The costly illnesses resulted from microscopic particulate matter and sulfur dioxide penetrating the human shell. Not as commonly discussed is the way non-human animals were also impacted by the same anthropogenic pollution. We cannot define our bodies as having well-defined boundaries because this mindset separates our bodies from the rest of the world. This allows us to become apathetic to the ways we affect and are affected by the world.

Coal-related health problems are easily accepted; the idea that trans-corporeality applies to our interactions with consumer products is less popular. The beginning of this article refers to real stories in which chemicals in everyday products disrupted the lives of unsuspecting people.

According to the Center for Disease Control (CDC), Americans use more than 100,000 chemicals and introduce 1,000 new chemicals each year. While many chemicals are completely harmless, some cause serious health risks. With so much at stake, it may be surprising that thousands of these chemicals have flooded our lives without adequate safety assessments.

Until very recently, the 1976 Toxic Substance Control Act (TSCA) was the national chemical regulation. It allowed any chemical to enter the market unless the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) could prove it posed an “unreasonable risk.” In addition to the impossible task of testing every chemical on the market, the EPA lacked authority to regulate even well-documented carcinogens. This is because a judge denied the EPA’s ban on asbestos, a mineral proven to cause lung cancer, in 1991 and set a precedent to make it nearly impossible to ban dangerous chemicals. 40 years passed with thousands of chemicals flowing into supermarkets, grocery stores, and your home.

Fortunately, in 2016, Congress passed the Frank R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21st

Century Act. This new law corrects many of TSCA’s faults by making it easier to address risks posed by chemicals, requiring an enforceable schedule for reviewing chemicals, and expediting action on chemicals posing the greatest risks.

While this law contains several loopholes and unnecessary activities that may divert resources, it is a huge step forward.

At this point in time, thousands of possibly dangerous chemicals are still on the market. It will take years for the EPA to complete investigations on even the highest priority chemicals. As individuals, we often half-heartedly point out that some products may cause cancer, yet we neglect to change our own behavior. Perhaps that is because once we admit our favorite products make us sick, we will be forced to confront a significant flaw in our comfortable lifestyle—and such a thought is too painful to consider. I insist we become mindful of what we allow into our bodies and what we release back into the environment.

Although I have not quite given up using deodorant, I nonetheless recognize that I can make small changes in my lifestyle, like using organic products. People interested in learning more information about consumer products can search the Environmental Working Group’s Skin Deep Cosmetics Database to find safety ratings and information about individual chemical components.

It is unreasonable (and arguably impossible) to expect consumers to filter out every potentially harmful chemical from their lives. However, until corporations and the government properly cooperate on regulating toxic chemicals, it would be wise to double check that what you allow in your body is actually safe. At the very least, if ingesting untested chemicals does not bother you, consider how your waste affects others’ bodies next time you toss your trash out of sight.

Sarah Greenberg '19 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences and the Olin Business School. She can be reached at sarahgreenberg@wustl.edu.

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WHY ALL DRUGS SHOULD BE LEGAL Connor Warshauer, staff writer | Illustration by Avni Joshi

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woman stands on a street corner and takes out a small cylinder of a drug rolled in paper. A policeman walks by and glances over. Could this woman be in trouble? Well, that depends on whether or not the drug has been repeatedly proven to cause lung cancer, even to second-hand users. If so, the woman has nothing to worry about; but if the drug is a largely harmless, non-addictive, and medicinally useful plant, she could be arrested.

What justifies the difference between policies on drugs like tobacco and marijuana?

According to Tessie Castillo, the historical decisions to criminalize certain drugs were motivated almost entirely by race. While heroin, cocaine, and marijuana were all originally legal pharmaceutical drugs, the government criminalized them when they became associated with Chinese, black, and Mexican people, respectively. These historical justifications persist today, as minorities face far higher rates of incarceration and arrests due to drug-related crimes than whites, despite equal rates of usage, according to the Brookings Institution.

While the prohibition of marijuana and the legalization of alcohol and tobacco clearly provide grounds for hypocrisy claims, this inconsistency in policy extends far beyond marijuana. According to a study on behalf of the Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs that measured the harm caused by different drugs to both users and others, alcohol was the most harmful, outscoring even heroin and meth. In terms of harm to users, heroin, meth, and crack cocaine scored higher than alcohol, but powder cocaine, ecstasy, and LSD all ranked much lower.

In terms of harm to others, alcohol scored more than double the second most harmful drug, heroin. Sound public policy requires consistency; if one drug meets the standards required to outlaw it and the law fails to outlaw other drugs that meet the same standards, either the standards or the one of the laws must be wrong. Therefore, the government should either prohibit alcohol and tobacco or legalize all less dangerous drugs.

The only possible excuse for failing to take either course can be the targeting of minority populations or more charitably, political considerations.

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A return to the prohibition of alcohol and tobacco should be taken seriously as a solution to the dilemma posed by the inconstancy in current policy. However, prohibition was a wildly ineffective policy that was largely ignored both by lower levels of government and citizens.

Almost no policy-makers seriously propose a return to prohibition, and according to CNN only 18 percent of voters would support such policies (admittedly, my proposal scores even worse).

The reason for this unpopularity seems to be that people accept that the use of alcohol should be a personal choice. This belief has its roots in the most fundamental argument in favor of drug legalization: bodily autonomy.

Despite the obesity epidemic, nobody proposes banning McDonald’s. Instead, government and civil society focus on dietary education, health care, and safety regulation.

The principle of bodily autonomy asserts that people have a right to do what they wish with their own bodies, and the government may not intervene unless other people are at risk. This principle explains why we reject slavery and rape; both actions involve other people dictating how one may use their bodies. People may only work or have sex consensually. The basis of the principle of bodily autonomy is that allowing anyone but oneself to have sovereignty of one’s body enables domination and coercion. It allows violence and inherently limits the ability of people to pursue their own goals.

Positive liberty theorists, however, would argue that what truly matters is one’s freedom to seek out one’s “real interests.” They argue that drugs prevent a person from knowing or pursuing their real interests, giving the government the right to protect people from themselves. This vision of liberty relies on the incredibly paternalistic notion that the government has a better idea of an individual's’ true interests than themselves. If the government cannot ascertain an individuals’ real interests better than the individuals’ themselves, they have no reason or right to interfere with their bodily autonomy.

However, government officials have no special ability to transcend psychology nor any intellectual superiority to the common people. After all, in a democratic society the people comprise the government. Each specific individual has a giant advantage in determining their own real interests, because they have privileged access to those interests. I know what I want because I want it. While others may be able to guess my general interests, people have diverse and valid aims and goals in life, and only each individual can say what those are.

More than simply being incorrect, the assumption that the government can dictate individuals’ real interests enables a slide into tyranny. The belief that the government knows best underlies all forms of censorship that seek to eliminate “wrong” or “dangerous” information from the public eye. Similarly, a government could justify a truly draconian control of individuals’ lives: making collegiate, professional, and even potentially interpersonal decisions for people in the vein of dystopian novels like The Giver. Of course, I’m not suggesting that the criminalization of drugs necessarily slides into this type of dystopia, but rather that the philosophical opposition to the principle of bodily autonomy also serves as a sound defense for tyranny.

In light of such arguments, we must reject the positive liberty view and endorse the principle of bodily autonomy. In this view, drug criminalization appears to be a clear rights violation. I have the unassailable right to put whatever I want into my body, even if the government thinks it’s bad for me. This argument applies equally to

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However, while the argument may be slightly true, drug consumption certainly doesn’t harm others to a degree that justifies interference.

Alcohol is by far the most dangerous drug to others, and yet we permit it. Instead, we outlaw the actually dangerous behavior: drunk driving.

While certain drugs may make other activities like driving dangerous for others, the law should prohibit those activities, not the consumption itself. This is how we approach nearly other form of illegal behavior: while reckless driving carries a small penalty, we don’t charge all reckless drivers as if they caused a crash.

Outside of driving under the influence, this argument usually takes two forms. First, drug consumption harms the family and friends of the users. This argument clearly holds no real weight, as the law doesn’t penalize individuals for other irresponsible behavior that may harm the family. Teenage sex without protection isn’t illegal, nor should it be. People should be free to make bad decisions, even if they upset others. Second, some argue that society should not have the pay the public health costs of rehabilitating addicts. However, the current law requires society to pay for their incarceration instead, resulting in a far larger bill for the taxpayer. all drugs, no matter how harmful they seem to us. We simply have no right to enforce our view onto others.

This conclusion doesn’t mean we give up on those with an addiction to harmful substances.

While we have no right to force them to stop consuming harmful substances, we can instead heavily regulate those substances to make them safer and take steps toward rehabilitation. In other areas of policy we’ve accepted this strategy: despite the obesity epidemic, nobody proposes banning McDonald’s. Instead, government and civil society focus on dietary education, health care, and safety regulation.

Those who disagree will most likely point to the opioid epidemic, arguing that legalizing heroin would exacerbate what’s already a national health crisis. While users harming themselves does not provide legitimate grounds to violate the principle of bodily autonomy, this argument fails to hold up to close scrutiny anyway.

According to The New York Times, the opioid epidemic originated with the over-prescription of legal drugs, which still cause nearly half of

opioid-related deaths. The spike in deaths from illegal substances comes largely from fentanyl, an opioid far more potent and dangerous than heroin. However, buyers rarely seek out fentanyl because it’s so dangerous. In most cases fentanyl cases, buyers unknowingly purchase heroin laced with fentanyl or pure fentanyl marketed as heroin.

The current policy response of cracking down on users has clearly failed. Regulation of legal opioids can be a huge part of the solution. In a legal heroin economy, buyers wouldn’t be fooled into purchasing fentanyl, which would have to be marked as such. Dosages could be far more easily controlled, and unsafe mixtures would cease to exist. These strategies along with educational and health care programs would do a far better job of reducing the epidemic than locking up addicts.

A more plausible response to the legalization of drugs that actually deals with the body autonomy argument is that drug consumption harms others. This would give the government legitimate grounds to step in and prevent usage.

This leads me to a final point. Even if prohibiting the use of drugs wasn’t a rights violation, punishing users seems cruel. Drug laws, in theory, are written to protect the very people who violate them from harming themselves. It’s entirely illogical to punish such people for harming themselves, as they’re already the victims. Instead, the law should focus on helping them as constructively as possible. That means providing them with care and aid, not a cell and bars. Nobody benefits from putting drug users in jails, except for racists who want to see minorities off the streets and away from the polls. This argument should unify an incredibly polarized public: conservatives should reject drug criminalization as government overreach and liberals should reject it as a tool of racial targeting. I have to believe that there are more people in this country committed to either conservatism or liberalism than there are committed to racism.

Connor Warshauer ‘21 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. He can be reached at cwarshauer@ wustl.edu.

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PROFIT, SELF-WORTH, AND THE UGLY SIDE OF THE BEAUTY INDUSTRY $84 billion: revenue made by US Beauty Industry in 2016

$382 billion: total worth of the global beauty industry

$3,770: how much money the average woman spends on mascara in a lifetime 12

$235: average cost of a session of laser hair removal

$455 million: spent by Loreal Paris on advertisements in 2016

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Hanna Khalil, features editor | Illustration by Michael Avery

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or many women, applying makeup is as much a part of their daily morning routine as brushing their teeth or eating breakfast. For many, it is a natural part of growing up, usually marked by an unfortunate incident of eyebrow tweezing gone wrong or a particularly dark “emo stage.”

But over the years, women have started a critical discussion surrounding the effect of makeup on women in society. Some women have argued that makeup is an instrument of the patriarchy, forcing women to conform to expectations of the male gaze. Other women insist that it is a form of self-expression, even an art form, and something that women do for themselves.

Perhaps the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Every woman has the right to make choices surrounding her body, whether that’s the color of her eyeshadow or the decision to seek botox injections. But choices, especially ones around self-image, are not made in a vacuum. They are informed by a variety of factors, often ones not in our control, from the comments we get from our co-workers, to the images in magazines, to the messages we hear in song lyrics. One especially influential factor is the amount of profit made through the beauty industry itself, and the way this profit relies on women choosing to make purchases over and over again. Considering these grey areas, rather than simply discussing this issue as a matter of repression or choice, can provide better insight into how the beauty industry impacts conceptions of self-worth and agency.

The $382 billion global “beauty” industry has effectively targeted every aspect of appearance, ranging between hair-care, hair removal, makeup, plastic surgery, skin-care, diet plans and perfumes. Built as much on promises for attractiveness as on fears of ugliness, products targeting the superficial guarantee not only better looks, but happiness too. The effect of multinational companies extracting huge profits from this psychology are not to be dismissed. One study shows that 53 percent of American 13-year-old girls are “unhappy with their bodies,” and by the time those girls reach 17, this number grows to 78 percent.

These low feelings of self-worth, which can

be tied to lower rates of confidence at school and work, are a direct result of the constant, targeted messaging surrounding appearance, beauty, and perfection.

Beauty standards also reflect other aspects of women’s identity, such as age and race.

As women grow older, products shift toward promising anti-aging solutions that seem to be able to stop time itself. Aging is deemed a failure in effectively “combating” wrinkles and fine lines, rather than a natural inevitability.

For women of color, especially black women, the entire industry is structured to imagine the default consumer as white. Black women are under-represented in modeling and beauty campaigns, and cheaper, mainstream brands provide a much more limited range of darker shades. This leaves many women of color searching harder and spending more money for products that suit their needs, with black women on average spending 80 percent more than white women on cosmetics.

However, recently there has been pushback against a narrative of beauty rooted in insecurity that is often so dominant in mainstream companies. Rihanna has been praised for the release of her beauty-line, Fenty Beauty, which promises a wide, inclusive range of 40 shades. Through various social media platforms, ordinary women have shared how much it means to feel seen and represented by this line. IIskra Lawrence, famous model and the face of Aerie clothing brand has become an advocate for body positivity, self-acceptance, and mental health and is known for speaking out against digitally retouching photos in the fashion industry.

Through her health and wellness program, “EverBODY with Iskra,” she promotes recipes, workouts, and meditations aimed at creating a “judgement free zone” for women to approach health in a holistic way that goes beyond weight loss. In addition, a range of professional Youtubers have carved out their own space in the beauty industry, connecting with millions of loyal fans as they review their favorite brands or demonstrate makeup tutorials. Makeup and beauty products are often portrayed through these videos as a fun hobby, something they do because it makes them feel good, not because they’re forced

too. Women like these propose a reformed way of approaching beauty, and present a possible shift in the industry’s messaging.

Considering these various trends in the beauty industry complicates the simple framing of makeup as either empowering or degrading. Ultimately the decision to participate in this system belongs to each woman, whether that be the decision to purchase a $5 lipstick, or the decision to invest in hundreds of dollars of laser hair removal. But considering the sheer amount of money invested in, and dependent on, women continuing to feel that there is something they can “fix” about themselves, troubles this simple narrative of “choice” and “agency.” When the consequences of not conforming—to the expectation of wearing makeup to work or to fitting a Hollywood casting call’s “look,” —are so high, the “choice” can seem pretty obvious.

But this begs the question: how can we be critical of this industry and its harmful messaging while not demonizing the women who partake in it or dismissing those who have created modes of empowerment through it?

The reality is, we all live within systems that are bigger than ourselves. Maybe the answer is to shift the responsibility away from any particular woman, who is put in the position of grappling with these systems every day, but instead ask more of the corporations who actually control and profit from this system. Or perhaps the answer lies in cultivating a spirit of self love and self acceptance within ourselves, and within our communities, through methods that cost nothing at all. Maybe we can build networks of support that little by little counteract the billions of dollars of critique we hear, and overpower this industry with affirmations of worth that have everything to do with the friends, sisters, and people we are as opposed to the tightness of our skin or the color of our lips.

Hanna Khalil ‘20 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. She can be reached at hannakhalil@wustl.edu.

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WHO WILL TAKE CARE OF THE HOMELESS? Ishaan Shah, staff writer | Illustration by Lucy Chen

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r. Matthew Desmond, critically acclaimed sociology professor and author of the Pulitzer Prize winning novel Evicted, stands before an audience of educated, middle-aged men and women in a Washington D.C. bookstore, giving a heartbreaking, impassioned speech about the worst inequalities and injustices of housing. He fervently pleads, “Do we believe that housing is a fundamental right? Do we believe that part of what it means to be an American is to have access to safe and decent housing? We have affirmed the right to a basic education, provision in old age, basic nutrition because we have agreed as a society that those things are fundamental to human flourishing.

And it’s hard to argue that housing isn’t fundamental to human flourishing. Without stable shelter, everything else falls apart.” By the end of his speech, the crowd is at a loss for words.

Audience members bring to the question-answer session their own experiences with eviction, and there is an apparent tension in the room. “What can we do about this issue now?” one of the audience members questions. He complains how it’s often hard to get poor people to vote and support public housing expansion initiatives. Another bemoans the distracted nature of politicians that dance around the issue of housing who choose to bring seemingly less important policy initiatives to the table instead.

By the end of Dr. Desmond’s talk, there is an anxious sentiment in the room to answer a single question: How do we convince America that affordable housing is a right?

The answer is that you don’t. Desmond’s book and his argument approach in excruciating detail the injustices of housing. In every sense of the idea, the book demonstrates that housing creates poverty by impacting mental health, physical health, education, security, and stability. However, while these injustices are unjust, not everybody views them as unjust enough.

In a similar theoretical vein, many health professionals, policy experts, and physicians have approached the question: is health care a right?

In the famous iteration of this type of piece, Atul Gawande revisited his hometown in Athens, Ohio, to find out how locals felt about social programs that guaranteed healthcare. One of

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the constituents, Monna, complained, “If you’re disabled, if you’re mentally ill, fine, I get it…. But I know so many folks on Medicaid that just don’t work. They’re lazy.” Monna could be classified as lower-middle class and has herself struggled to pay for health insurance as she has grown older. It is easy to look at Monna’s perspective as the simple idea that “poor people are lazy.”

Gawande, however, arrives at the true rationale behind her argument in his analysis. He shows how Monna misinterprets the struggles that the poorest endure, assuming that they are simply “sitting at home and collecting paychecks.”

The United States is already a country dominated by dangerously high inequality across racial, ethnic, and geographic lines. This inequality leads to an entrenched stratification of the most vulnerable members of society. These citizens whose struggles are so varied are pitted against each other in an ugly battle for the ultimate prize: upward mobility. The line between the haves and the have-nots is blurred because the struggles each of them face are unique to their experience. Inevitably, amidst the shaming of poverty in American society and the cultural divisions in American neighborhoods

and communities, there is disagreement on who deserves what and posing a universal philosophical question such as "is housing a right” does more harm than good. Posing a question about the “right to shelter” will bring out harsh opinions about the “deserving needy” and those who have yet to earn the support. It will also create controversy over what aspects of housing are a “right.” Is this right conditional on whether the tenants are gainfully employed? What is included in this right? Who qualifies for this right and is there a limited supply?

It will be incredibly difficult to convince enough Americans that there is a basic right to housing; rather, it is much more appropriate to convince the various factions that are harmed by homelessness, evictions, and housing inequities to advocate for and implement interventions. The most obvious group affected by this inequity is the poor. In Desmond’s paper “Eviction’s Fallout: Housing, Hardship, and Health,” he demonstrates that low-income urban mothers, arguably some of the greatest victims of evictions, have more residential instability, higher rates of depression, poorer health for themselves and their children, and difficulty maintaining stable

WU POLITICAL REVIEW | BODIES

employment post-eviction. The marginalized victims of evictions and housing inequity are in a poor position to advocate for themselves amidst the struggles they face. Alternatively, homelessness and poor housing affects the community as a whole. According to the National Alliance to End Homelessness, homelessness in cities is a deterrent to tourism, makes members of a community more wary of walking around in the city, and promotes deviant public behavior (street drinking, sleeping outside, etc.). The former secretary of HUD, Shaun Donovan, asserted that the cost of a homeless individual was on the order of $40,000 per year to taxpayers. Clearly, the cost of homelessness is far greater than the solution, but since its cost are distributed so widely, creating coalitions to address the problem has been difficult.

If we give hospitals more control over their payments, they may become the powerful creators of social change that we have been seeking for so long.

One solution to targeting the cost of homelessness is to focus on health. A disproportionate amount of the cost of a homeless individual is actualized through their cost to a community’s health care system. In “Homelessness and Health,” a study of homelessness in Canada found that the homeless had disproportionately worse reproductive and sexual health, infection burden, and chronic disease than other low-income populations. The study also found that the homeless use health care at nearly five times the rate of other low-income populations and stay in hospitals for longer periods. A study published in American Drug and Health Benefits found that almost 33 percent of visits to the emergency department are made by the chronically

homeless. On average, homeless individuals will cost a hospital $18,500 a year (Corporation for Supportive Housing, California). When supportive housing was provided to members of the chronically homeless, their health care costs dropped by 60 percent. Furthermore, housing provided the stability for many of the chronically homeless to deal with external stressors and take care of their mental health as well. Health is a powerful paradigm to understand why we need to address homelessness and can provide the economic incentive to do so.

If the costs of homelessness are so evidently damaging and concentrated in a single area, why hasn’t there been a large push by hospitals to help house the homeless? There have been isolated instances where hospitals have tried to support public housing projects. For example, Florida Hospital made a one-time donation of $6 million over three years to create public housing in central Florida. The University of Illinois Hospital in Chicago is partnering with the Center for Housing and Health to expand a pilot program which identified high-use patients and transitioned them into housing.

However, progress is slow and fragmented.

Hospitals are spending a great amount of time identifying high-risk patients and determining whether the costs-savings are truly beneficial to the hospital system.

Currently, it can be complicated for a hospital to figure out whether there is financial incentive to house the homeless. Most hospitals are still paid for care under a fee-for-service model, where they receive payments for each medical service they provide. And even though most homeless individuals don’t have insurance, these hospitals are still paid for each of these services through a combination of federal, state, and local funding sources (Kaiser Family Foundation). And so even though emergency departments spend much of their time caring for the homeless, they are still compensated for the care and would only pursue homelessness-reduction initiatives if their emergency departments are over-burdened by the volume of patients. In other words, the providers bear little financial risk over the health of their patients and therefore aren’t actively seeking unorthodox approaches to cut costs of care.

One solution to foster policy innovation that

improves outcomes and cuts costs is to move the risk from payers to providers through a system called capitation. Capitated health care systems do not pay for individual services; rather, they pay providers a risk-adjusted monthly reimbursement for taking care of a patient. In this payment system, health-care providers have much more room for experimentation to find cost-saving measures or initiatives because they are able to reap the rewards of cost-saving interventions as profit. A report from the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness found nine scalable, successful policy initiatives which have allowed for the expansion of affordable housing in their local communities. One of these initiatives co-opted by the Health Plan of San Mateo worked to transition 124 high-costs patients from nursing homes to housing with supportive services. In that process, the plan saved over $2 million while also improving the quality of life of these seniors. These initiatives all have a common pattern: a capitated health delivery system, a hospital community benefits obligation, and an expanding population to care for. When the payment system allowed for and encouraged hospitals to be more flexible with their money, they responded by pursuing interventions which reduced their bottom line like providing better housing for poorer patients.

Health is a transformational lens through which we can foster social change. If we give hospitals more control over their payments, they may become the powerful creators of progress that we have been seeking for so long. And so where should Americans look for the solution to the housing crisis? The answer: their doctors.

Ishaan Shah ‘20 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. He can be reached at ishaanshah@wustl.edu.

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THE PROMISE OF BETTER SEX ED Hanna Khalil, features editor | Photo courtesy of Pixaby

“I

want you to look at these vaginas so that you know that vaginas can look one hundred different normal ways, and so that you don’t believe people when they tell you that vaginal reconstruction surgery can fix you.”

Twenty-five tired and now stunned faces looked back at our teacher, having difficulty processing her words at 8:08 a.m. Up to this point, health class had meant talking about good nutrition and the names of our bones, not graphic photos of pink, brown, purple-ish vaginas. We passed around the packet of vagina photos, some students flipped through them unphased, others tried to conceal their wide-eyed surprise, and still others passed the photos on, barely touching the pages.

This was the start of sex ed, a semester-long course mandatory for tenth graders at my relatively liberal high school. By the end of it, there was little shyness left when it came to talking about the human body, in all of its shapes, colors, and functions. This sex education was comprehensive. We memorized detailed diagrams of genitalia, yes, but we also talked about every form of contraception under the sun, the symptoms and treatments of different STDs, and strategies for communicating with your partner. We took robotic baby dolls home for the night that woke us up with real screaming and

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reflected on the challenges of child-rearing. We were reminded of the basket of free condoms always kept in the drawer of the health room desk. Abstinence, that key, ever-present word when it comes to sex education, was presented as a completely valid and safe choice, but simply one choice of many.

It was not until my freshman year Introduction to Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) class that I realized my high school experience had been the exception, not the rule. Student after student told stories of their abstinence-until-marriage curriculum, of awkward teachers who acted as if sex would probably just kill you, a real-life version of the gym teacher from Mean Girls. Sex was shameful, and in response a lot of my peers had turned to the internet and each other for guidance. At the same time, college also made me see the ways in which my sex ed wasn’t as perfect as I had thought. It was still overwhelmingly heteronormative, and by tenth grade some kids were sexually active before first being exposed to this information.

These anecdotes are small examples of a much larger, troubling picture of sex education in our country. According to a survey conducted by the Alan Guttmacher Institute, a non-profit health research organization,

23% of public high schools in the U.S. require abstinence-only sex education, teaching that “physical and emotional harm” are likely to result from premarital sex. In a 2014 study of 44 states conducted by the Center for Disease Control (CDC), fewer than half of the high schools surveyed taught all 16 topics recommended by the CDC as part of a comprehensive sex education curriculum.

Proponents of the abstinence-only curriculum, including government representatives primarily from the conservative right, argue that if we raise the bar for delaying sex until marriage, students will rise to the occasion. Not only does this type of thinking impose a moral, rather than medical, judgement on sex, it doesn’t even work. A CDC study comparing abstinence-only programs and comprehensive risk-reduction programs did not find conclusive evidence that education stressing abstinence actually led to a change in behaviors. On the other hand, risk-education programs were tied to positive trends related to frequency of teen pregnancy, unprotected sex, and STIs. Despite the overwhelming evidence, education policy has not reflected this data. Since 1982, the US government has spent over $2 billion dollars on abstinence-only education. This trend has continued most recently under the

WU POLITICAL REVIEW | BODIES

Trump administration, making the question of the future of sex education as important as ever.

The 2017 federal budget included $90 million in funding for abstinence-only programs, the highest level since 2009, and in July 2017 Congress announced the end of the Office of Adolescent Health’s evidence-based Teen Pregnancy Prevention program.

Reflecting back on my own experience, I realized that a number of factors had come together to allow for my lucky sex education.

While my school was free and public, it was administered through the City University of New York system, rather than the Department of Education. It therefore had a lot more leeway in constructing its own curriculum in a number of subjects, including sex ed. Its location in the heart of extremely liberal New York City meant that it did not have to adapt to social and cultural backlash from the local community. It was relatively well-funded, and could dedicate resources towards a class that is often an afterthought. While I feel extremely grateful for my education, I am not satisfied with my experience being “exceptional.” All of my peers in that WGSS class should have been afforded the same knowledge and ability to make informed choices about their bodies, no matter the location of their school district or if their state was red or blue.

For so many reasons, we must do better. Sex education that doesn’t fully and comprehensively educate is dangerous not only because it denies students access to the information needed for making healthy decisions, but also for the negative sex culture into which it feeds.

Under abstinence-only education programs, young people in the United States will be taught that unless it’s happening in the marriage bed between a man and woman, sex is too shameful to be talking about at all. This not only leads to statistically higher incidents of sexually transmitted diseases and teen pregnancy, but also represents a largely missed opportunity to develop a conversation around what safe, consensual sex looks like.

Now more than ever before it has become painfully clear that this is a conversation we must be having. Over the past few months, the dialogue surrounding the epidemic of sexual assault and violence in the country has grown at an

unprecedented rate, as the #MeToo movement has empowered thousands of survivors to tell their stories of harassment, assault, and rape.

Tarana Burke, founder of Just Be Inc., a non-profit focusing on promoting health and well-being in women of color, founded the movement years before the hashtag went viral, in response to hearing stories of assault from so many survivors. She wanted to create a path towards healing, and most recently, a wave of testimonies from survivors across the country demanded that giants from a range of fields and industries—Harvey Weinstein, Larry Nasser, and Al Franken to name a few—be held accountable for their violence. As a society, publically supporting these survivors and demanding accountability is a powerful way of sending the message that this behavior is unacceptable.

Education is not everything, but it’s something. And I think starting with something is better than not starting at all.

However, if #MeToo has taught us anything, it is that sexual violence is a problem that goes beyond a select group of famous men. It is systemic. It is pervasive. And it is supported by a culture that has, on every level, normalized toxic masculinity, sexual aggression, and victim blaming. A problem this systemic requires a solution of the same thoroughness. One part of that solution can and must be reformed sex education for all students.

Sex education provides an incredible opportunity to positively influence the way students understand healthy, safe, and consensual sex from an early age. By destigmatizing the conversation around sex, we empower students with the vocabulary to communicate to their partner what they are and what they are not comfortable with. It makes clear the types of behaviors that are abusive, even if students

have been conditioned by the media and our misogynistic culture to think otherwise. Sex ed can be a place to not just talk about the rates of STDs and how to prevent them, but also the rates of interpersonal violence and strategies for ensuring healthy relationships.

At Wash U, these conversations are being led through programming such as The Date and by groups such as Leaders in Interpersonal Violence Education (LIVE). But it is unfair to expect that these efforts alone will be able to effectively undo 18 years of socialization and miseducation. These conversations must be happening much earlier, adapting and growing as students mature.

For this reason, sex education must move away from the narrow confines of abstinence-until-marriage. At the minimum, better sex education makes people more comfortable being able to talk about sex, period. Because if we can’t talk about safe, healthy sex in a way that does not insight shame, how can we expect to move forward on issues as sensitive, personal, and traumatic as assault? If we believe that education has the power to create responsible citizens, we must trust it to have the power to teach our youth to not hurt one another.

To those who would point out that education is not the full solution, I am not so naïve as to think that there is such a thing as a magical fix, a singular policy suggestion or piece of legislation that can undo such a deeply engrained cultural problem as sexual violence. But to allow students to continue to be misinformed, to let our government systematically reinforce the roots of this epidemic through its educational agenda, is a huge disservice. Education is not everything, but it’s something. And starting with something is better than not starting at all.

Hanna Khalil ‘20 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. She can be reached at hannakhalil@wustl.edu.

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WU POLITICAL REVIEW | BODIES

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WU POLITICAL REVIEW | BODIES Piece by Gavi Weitzman

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A TIMELINE OF CHALLENGES AND PROGRESS IN ADDRESSING HIV/AIDS Max Lichtenstein, features editor

I

n the 1980s and 1990s, fear, paranoia, and confusion over the enigmatic and epidemic HIV virus marked American culture. HIV, which stands for human immunodeficiency virus, weakens the human immune system and can easily spread through bodily fluids.

It is often transmitted through needles and unprotected sex. HIV is especially noteworthy and dangerous because it can lead to a condition known as AIDS, or acquired immunodeficiency syndrome. People with AIDS have great difficulty fighting off infections due to the damage on their immune systems, and easily develop deadly illnesses such as tuberculosis and lymphoma. In 1987, President Reagan referred to AIDS as “public health enemy #1,” and throughout the late ‘80s and ‘90s many popular TV shows and films, such as Miami Vice and Philadelphia, took up issues of AIDS in their storylines. Rap duo Salt-N-Pepa released a song called “Let’s Talk About AIDS” in 1990, directly confronting prevention and misconceptions of AIDS. Perhaps most notably, several figures prominently in the public eye, such as NBA star Magic Johnson, came forward as HIV-positive.

Since the 1990s, however, AIDS and HIV have largely faded away from public attention in the United States, as if the virus itself had similarly vanished. While today it would seem a stretch to view a show like Rent as particularly topical, as HIV/AIDS rarely make headlines these days, it is dangerous and irresponsible to consider HIV a problem of the past. The breakthrough and widespread adoption of antiretroviral treatment has lowered the reach and deadliness of many AIDS cases in the U.S., yet thousands of Americans still die from AIDS-related causes each year, succumbing to infections or cancers that arise from the body’s debilitated immune system. Many do not have access to affordable healthcare, do not have reliable transportation to keep up with appointments, or feel too ashamed to pursue treatment after decades of stigma against the disease. In the South, where about

20

half of new HIV diagnoses occur in the U.S., impoverished African-American communities are particularly plagued by low levels of healthcare accessibility. This phenomenon is detrimental, as U.S. infection rates for African Americans sit at eight times that of whites.

The contemporary situation is even more alarming in the Global South. Only one-third of those living with HIV in poor and moderate-income countries are on antiretroviral medication, allowing the virus to continue spreading at an astonishing rate, with no clear deceleration in sight. Indeed, 97 percent of people worldwide who have HIV live in these countries. AIDS treatment is also extremely expensive, and several African countries— including Ethiopia, Kenya, and Zimbabwe— spend 30 to 60 percent of their total health ministry budget on HIV and AIDS. In short, the countries most affected by HIV (primarily due to the low rate of condom use) are least able to pay for its treatment and prevention, and do not benefit from a massive pop culture push for awareness and advocacy.

Many of the cultural and social consequences of the initial AIDS crisis in the U.S. remain relevant and are still felt today. The crisis certainly ignited rampant homophobia both in the U.S. and internationally, as bigots and reactionaries abused gay and bisexual men, ousting them as those responsible for the epidemic.

Several contemporary studies have shown that gay men around the world still feel a lasting sense of self-stigma, which leads to unhealthy behavior related to HIV. For instance, MSMGF, a global health organization dedicated to men who have sex with men and HIV, concluded in a 2014 study that men who perceived more stigma and discrimination for their sexuality were less likely to seek out and take advantage of HIV services, such as testing and prevention programs. The opposite held true for men with higher levels of engagement and identification with the LGBT community. Smallerscale studies in China and Tijuana, Mexico

yielded similar results, indicating that conceptions of masculinity and homophobia often led to depression and self-stigma for men who have sex with men, deterring them from the question of HIV altogether. Conversely, the shock of the epidemic opened up a discourse for many issues, including medical privacy, the concept of patient activism, and sex education. Both in the public sphere and in private, people began talking about these issues for the first time, either because they previously held a taboo status or had simply yet to be conceptualized. With unavoidable issues and confusion regarding sexually transmitted diseases, homosexuality, and medical ethics facing the world, these conversations had to take place.

AIDS may no longer hold its epidemic status in the U.S. or garner as much media attention as it once did. Nevertheless, the lack of an HIV vaccine, the incredibly low rate of the viral suppression in the Global South, and the mere continued existence of what was once “public health enemy #1” in the contemporary world demonstrate the importance of looking forward as well as backward in our reflection on HIV. Because the fight against AIDS and HIV is far from over, the continued push for the accelerated development and widespread availability of treatment is indispensable.

Max Lichtenstein ‘20 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. He can be reached at max.lichtenstein@wustl.edu.

1967 HIV is believed to arrive in Haiti via an individual from the Democratic Republic of the Congo 1968 First confirmed case of HIV in North America found in a teenage boy who had never left the Midwest

1976

HIV is believed to have spread from New York City to San Francisco, spanning the entire North American continent

H

1981

1982 1984

Researches label the “four-H club� as the only populations at risk for HIV: hemophiliacs, homosexuals, heroin users, and Haitians

The National Cancer Institute identifies the HIV virus as the cause of AIDS, a complex condition that stems from a damaged immune system

The AIDS epidemic officially begins, as the Center for Disease Control discovers multiple unusual clusters of Pneumocystis pneumonia (among other opportunistic diseases) among otherwise healthy men

1985

U.S. blood banks begin screening for HIV, and entirely forbid any men who have sex with men from donating blood. (These rules were relaxed in 2015, but men who have had sex with another man in the past year are still banned from donating blood)

RT

PO PASS

1987

The U.S. government institutes a travel ban on visitors or immigrants with HIV. (Despite continued insistence from medical experts that there was no scientific basis justifying the ban, it was not lifted until 2010, 23 years later)

1995 2002

The FDA approves the first official HIV test kits, which are able to identify the virus in under 20 minutes

2003

The CDC discovers and publishes that 56,300 new infections arise each year.

They also discover the existence of a large population unaware that they are infected.

These figures showed no significant improvement from the 1990s

2012

The FDA approves PrEP, a medication combining two drugs that is shown to reduce the risk of HIV by more than 90 percent. Through daily intake, an HIV-negative person can prevent the virus from taking hold and spreading through the body. It is the first FDA-approved HIV/AIDS medication since 1977

AIDS claim 50,000 American lives, making it the leading cause of death for American adults. Globally, AIDS is responsible for over 600,000 deaths

TODAY 36.7 million people live with HIV globally. Over one million of them are Americans. Around one million people died from AIDS-related causes last year. Death rates in the U.S. have dropped 80 percent since 1995, killing around 7,000 people in 2016. 18.9 percent of South Africans adults are infected with HIV. There is no HIV vaccine available

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WU POLITICAL REVIEW | BODIES

WHAT IS OURS IS NOT YOURS 0. 3/5. 1 Kirk Brown | Photo courtesy of Unsplash

whole.

Bought for a price from the motherland, a value has been assigned to blacks since our ancestors were taken from Africa on a one-way trip. Throughout the course of American history, white people have always undervalued the worth of black people. In WWI, the army used the Harlem Hellfighters (369th Regiment) as fodder so that white soldiers would not have to face so heavy an attack. We were viewed as expendable. Even killing a black person was not considered a crime at the turn of the 20th century. In fact, lynchings sometimes served as town functions; families brought their kids out to view the public spectacle. Simply put, these values stem from the root of white supremacy.

And although our votes count as much as those of white people now and lynching is illegal, it still feels as though we are worth less than they are today. But why is that? Is it because the KKK and Nazis are considered to be “fine people” in the eyes of Donald Trump? Has Donald Trump’s rise to power normalized these racist elements of American society? These situational factors, among others, contribute every day to the war on the black body in America. American society desires to claim a culture that has never belonged to it.

It always confuses me when I hear people say that racism is over or that racism is dead. I always think, “How do you not recognize that you would face a lighter sentence for committing the same crime as me? Do you not see the glances I get from police? If you died, they might use one of your senior pictures as your name flashes across the five-o’clock news. Me? If I had a mug shot, it would flash across every television screen within the broadcasting area without a second thought.” This ability to ignore racism is an inherent form of privilege and it ignores the struggles that plague black bodies all around the world every day. To fully comprehend this war on black bodies and the struggles that come in fighting in this war, one has to be black.

The more frequent examples are displayed in the treatment of black women and their hair.

It seems like we hear a story every year about a black girl and her choice of hairstyle being

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denied from a prom or homecoming dance because it doesn’t conform to the standards set in a school’s dress code. As a society, America has come together and forged this belief that if hair isn’t straight, it isn’t beautiful. If it isn’t blonde or brunette, then there is still more to be desired. Traditional beauty standards are coded language, saying that being white is the epitome of attractiveness.

I am not saying it is wrong to be white. It is wrong, though, to fail to recognize the history that has said that black is not beautiful, only because it is black. Society has always put black women on a lower rung when compared to other races; however, it feels as though people want to adopt these beautiful features that come with being black. This is more commonly known as appropriation (e.g. Kim Kardashian getting her hair done in cornrows). Our society must stop using a double standard against black women.

Characteristics that make black women beautiful are not deemed socially acceptable until her white counterpart “tries it out.” It is only cool once another race does it, as if they are stepping outside of their own comfort zone. For blacks, we cannot just try out these “beauty trends.”

This is just you taking advantage of something

that we cannot simply wash out or take off.

Whether it is weave, Botox injections, or spray tanning, it seems as though our society has deemed it acceptable to get as close to blackness as possible, without experiencing its struggles. It is as though people are comfortable appropriating the culture, but they do not want to appropriate the pain. People that are intent on taking our physical features are not the ones who march with us, call their representatives on our behalf, or educate others about the struggle of being black in America. (But they will say the n-word without shame as part of one of their favorite Kendrick songs. That’s a topic for another article.) As much as some Americans would like to say that these characteristics of our society are novel with Donald Trump in office, that would be inaccurate. These values have been around since Europeans descended on Africa. But this time, we are not in chains.

Kirk Brown ‘20 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. He can be reached at kirk.brown@wustl.edu.

WU POLITICAL REVIEW | BODIES

THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION, FORGOTTEN Jacob Finke | Illustration by Edison Ho

W

hat does it mean when a body disappears?

What causes the disappearance? Death comes to mind first, but that’s not quite right. When somebody dies, their body is usually memorialized via a grave, a cremation, some sort of memorial service, a crypt, or any other kind of memorial. Sometimes, however, those memories themselves disappear. What happens when a memory disappears? That is when a body truly disappears.

Memory is an interesting thing. Growing up, young people’s perception is that memory is set in stone like history: things happen, and we remember them.

Only in high school or college do we learn that memory can be—and is easily—manipulated. It can be manipulated for political reasons, such as the United States’ whitewashing of our own memory of concentration camps (see: Filipino and Japanese internment) or some of the more barbarous acts of America’s Founding Fathers. Or, for example, Chinese memory of the Cultural Revolution.

The Cultural Revolution took place from 1966-76, after advisors of Mao Zedong—then the Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party and ruler of the People’s Republic of China—issued edicts on Mao’s behalf warning of a bourgeois infiltration of the Party. In an effort to root out the counter-revolutionaries, Mao issued calls for all Party loyalists to purge bourgeois elements from society.

According to The Guardian, up to two million Chinese were killed in the ten years that followed, most directly by government forces. They were professors, attacked in their universities by their own students.

They were businesspeople, attacked walking down the street for their clothing. Millions more Chinese— including future Chinese presidents Deng Xiaoping and Xi Jinping—were “purged.” Children were sent to farms in the countryside, and some Party members were consigned to menial labor. This period of tumult, terror, and upheaval did not end until Mao’s death in 1976.

One would think that an event this traumatizing

would be canonized in Chinese memory, but that might not be the case.

The People’s Education Press, a state-owned textbook company in China, published in 2018 a new edition of its eighth-grade history textbook. This surely wouldn’t be newsworthy, except that the publishers omitted the chapter documenting the Cultural Revolution, according to the South China Morning Post. One chapter in previous editions was called “The 10 Years of Cultural Revolution.” In the new edition, that same chapter is titled “Arduous Exploration and Development Achievements,” and has been reduced to six paragraphs.

exploration and development achievements. These victims—their bodies—are simply growing pains in a period of exploration for the People’s Republic of China.

It means a lot when a body disappears. It means a lot when a murder goes unsolved, or a missing child goes unfound. It means even more when millions of bodies disappear; when millions of murders go unresolved; when millions of missing children remain unsought. It has far-reaching implications, particularly for policy.

People enjoy making comparisons between Xi Jinping and Mao Zedong, particularly as Xi Jinping has continued consolidating power, making himself the head of: the party, the government, the military, and the ambitious anti-corruption campaign he is waging. I believe this comparison is shortsighted and simplistic.

However, as Xi Jinping has consolidated power, actions like this erasure of history must be taken seriously.

During the Cultural Revolution, Xi Jinping was “reeducated” in the countryside. His father, a small-time businessman, was purged from the Party and humiliated. His sister hanged herself during the Cultural Revolution out of shame.

Six paragraphs for two million bodies. What kind of memory is that? How can those bodies be remembered in six paragraphs? What does it mean that China is erasing the memory of one of its most traumatizing periods in post-1949 history? This is not exclusively a political issue; it is an issue of human dignity. There are adults alive today who might remember their parents being taken away by Red Guards or government soldiers—but nobody after them will. The Chinese government, by removing the memory of the Cultural Revolution from its educational canon, is removing those two million people from the Chinese memory. Their lives, their humanity, their personalities, their bodies, are no more.

Instead, victims of persecution will be relegated to six paragraphs in the chapter detailing the arduous

Xi Jinping’s childhood was decimated by Mao’s paranoia and the horror that it caused.

Fifty years later, Xi Jinping either allowed or forced this happen. Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party are, either directly or indirectly, responsible for the whitewashing of one of the darkest eras in the People’s Republic of China’s memory. The CCP has removed from popular education the memory of a paranoid purge, hoping that next year’s eighth-graders leave school with a less nuanced, more supportive view of the Chinese Communist Party.

What does that mean for the world?

Jacob Finke '20 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. He can be reached at jbfinke@wustl.edu.

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WU POLITICAL REVIEW | NATIONAL

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Please join alumni and current Washington University Government and Public Policy Work Group students for a low-key networking reception. This event will be an opportunity for students to meet and mingle with alumni working in defense, national security, government, domestic and foreign policy, international development, advocacy, diplomacy, and other relevant fields.

Light refreshments will be provided. Business casual dress is recommended, but not required.

Alumni Weekend: Friday, April 13, 1-3 pm Mocktails with WashU Alumni Danforth University Center, in Government, Policy & Advocacy Room 232 Questions? Contact Amy Heath-Carpentier at heath-carpentier@wustl.edu.

RSVP in CAREERlink: careercenter.wustl.edu/careerlink

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Sponsored by: The Career Center, The Center for Diversity and Inclusion, and International and Area Studies

WU POLITICAL REVIEW | NATIONAL

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WORLD ORDER AND AMERICAN INTEREST Yumeng Zou, staff writer

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nternational order, narrowly defined, means “the body of rules, norms, and institutions that govern relations among key players in the international environment.” Such rules, norms, and institutions include trade deals, security norms, networks, and alliances. The current international order arose after World War II and was shaped subsequently by the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union. It assumes American leadership and commitment and promotes American interests and values. It is also a central theme to the U.S. security strategy for decades, as the U.S. kept investing in it for longterm peace and prosperity.

Yet the volume of U.S. commitment that the current international order demands is not sustainable. As the global economy slows down, the U.S. government has to confront the issue of resource scarcity. Mackenzie Eaglen, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, has pointed out in her report to the Senate that U.S. defense strategy needs to spend wisely with limited budget. President Trump also articulated his concern over disproportional U.S. commitment by calling on allies to share responsibilities. Beyond budget constraint, globalization has been associated with inequality and unemployment for American workers, making it harder for the U.S. to extend its economic influence through free trade agreements. Given the inevitable contraction of U.S. power, the U.S. has to make trade-offs and identify priorities in the order-maintenance job, or the job would drain U.S. economy and hurt the image of the U.S. government.

In his new book Preventive Engagement, Paul B. Stares, the senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, proposed a risk-management framework for assessing trade-offs and determining priorities. He visited Wash U on Jan 25th and 26th to talk about his suggestions for the U.S. security strategy.

Stares argued that the current security strategy

is a supply-side strategy, where the only options are “Do More” and “Do Less”. “Do More” means more engagement in all aspects, from strengthening alliances to engaging in nation building.

“Do Less”, on the contrary, means withdrawal in all aspects, from economic isolation to selective intervention. “Do More” versus “Do Less” poses a dilemma for the U.S. security strategy which, under this premise, is asked to weigh domestic interest against oversea interest. Stares suggests that the dilemma is caused by poor designs in the current strategy. With an alternative approach, the U.S. can maximize its leverage with limited resources and stay powerful in the international arena.

The approach Stares proposes is the called “demand-side strategy,” a risk-management framework that emphasizes forward-thinking and forward-engagement in foreign policy.

The demand-side strategy is constituted by three parts: the long-term, the medium-term, and the short-term. In the long-term, the U.S. should: maintain strategic stability with other major powers such as Russia, China, and India; strengthen international institutions and bolster their functions; maintain alliances and encourage responsibility-sharing; promote international trade; and foster global development. In the medium-term, the U.S. intelligence agencies should make plans and rank priorities 12 to 18 months ahead. They should intervene immediately before any risk evolves into crisis.

Through early engagement, American agents can change the interest calculation of dangerous political actors or deprive them of violent means, therefore lowering the probability of a full-scale crisis. In the short-term, when a crisis has already broken out, the U.S. should pursue de-escalation with all possible means. The central theme of Stares’ strategy is to act earlier with more precision. To plan for the next year or the next five years, the intelligence community needs more comprehensive knowledge to

extrapolate potential outcomes. A side benefit of Stares’s strategy is the proposal of a risk-centered resource allocation scheme, which solves the “Do More” versus “Do Less” dilemma in supply-side strategy and operationalizes the ideal of wise spending.

The alternative strategy Stares proposed entails changes in security-related agencies. More bureaucrats need to devote their time to studying mid-term and long-term strategies and more elected officials need to create incentives for them to do so. Furthermore, the alternative strategy differentiates U.S. interests from its obligation towards the liberal, democratic international order. America did invest a lot in the current order, but such investments were justified because they favored America. The U.S. cannot be both a guarantor of the order and a player in the system without any conflict of interest, unless the system internalizes American interests, or some responsibility-sharing mechanisms are introduced. As pure players, Russia and China have used both institutional politics and power politics on the international arena, sometimes challenging the system and sometimes taking advantage of it. President Trump, on withdrawing from the Paris Accord and the TPP, seems envious of the players’ privilege. His moves captured the domestic anxiety towards foreign policy, but such anxiety needs to be properly channeled through calculated choices, not straight-up withdrawal or reluctant intervention. Demand-side strategy, by justifying expenses with risks and lowering costs with early action, would hopefully address this anxiety as a genuine solution.

Yumeng Zou ‘20 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. She can be reached at yumeng.zou@wustl.edu.

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WU POLITICAL REVIEW | NATIONAL

THE REALITY OF THE FAKE NEWS HYSTERIA Conor Smyth | Photos courtesy of Pixaby and Unsplash

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ince the 2016 election, “fake news” has become a stunningly popular topic among politicians in America and around the world. As of November 2017, the term’s usage had increased by 365 percent since 2016.

Donald Trump played a major role in its popularization, with his attacks on the media often laced with the term “fake news.” His “Fake News Awards,” for example, were just the latest installment in a long running feud between him and the mainstream media. However, the obsession over “fake news” is not limited to the Trumpian right; it also extends to the Clintonian left.

After her surprise loss to Trump in the 2016 election, Hillary was quick to dodge and distract when it came to the blame game. Even in an interview when she appeared to take ownership of her failings, she qualified that ownership by saying that her actions were not the real reason she lost. Among the phenomena Clinton and her supporters most frequently blame for her loss is “fake news.” Thus, it should be unsurprising that Democrats now want to curtail the spread of “fake news.”

Democrats’ anger, quite differently from Trump’s, is directed at non-mainstream “fake news.” They see fake stories on social media as a major threat to American democracy, a threat that they believe likely had a significant impact on the 2016 election. The reality of “fake news” on social media, however, tells a different story. To start, few Americans blindly trust the news they get from social media. According to a June 2017 IPSOS poll, only 22 percent of Democrats and 18 percent of Republicans trust the news they get from social media “all” or “most of the time.” In addition, a January 2018 study found that articles from sites accused of spreading “fake news” reached only a quarter of Americans between

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October 7th and November 14th of 2016, and that even those most prone to reading “fake news” read far more real news.

Democrats’ concern about “fake news” often focuses more specifically on alleged Russian propaganda circulated on social media.

However, both the reach and the amount of this kind of “fake news” are abysmally small.

On Twitter, based on a “deliberately broad” review, only 0.74 percent of election-related content was Russian-linked. On Google, there was $4,700 in “Russia-linked ad spending” during the 2016 general election. On Facebook, the most often targeted source of “fake news,” Russian-linked accounts spent over $100,000 on 3,000 ads that reached 10 million users.

Adding in free content, Russian propaganda supposedly reached 126 million users, though it is unknown how many of the users actually engaged with or believed the content. By comparison, one Clinton Super PAC, Correct the Record, spent $1 million on bots for Facebook and Reddit, and the Clinton and Trump campaigns spent a combined $81 million on Facebook ads, undoubtedly reaching far more users many more times than any Russian propaganda, even taking into account the extra traffic elicited by the polarizing nature of the Russian posts.

Despite the miniscule amount of “fake news” in social media, Democrats have continued their fight against its spread. Just recently, Russia hawks Adam Schiff and Dianne Feinstein penned a letter to social media companies asking for their cooperation in the fight against Russian-manufactured “fake news.” Last year, then Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid defended his call for Facebook and Twitter to crack down on “fake news,” saying, “Maybe it’s

a slippery slope, but let’s start going down the slope.”

Between blacklists and bannings, it is clear that the attack on “fake news” is not really, or even primarily, an attack on fabricated news stories; it is an attack on dissenting voices.

As a result of urgent calls for action, social media platforms have begun reforms. Facebook, which already has a team of 10,000 security personnel, 7,500 of whom “assess potentially violating content,” will more than double that force by the end of 2018. The company announced on January 11th, after months of experimenting with a system of flagging fake stories, that it would be changing its news feed algorithm to prioritize stories from more reliable, meaning more mainstream, news sources. Most worrying, though, is that Facebook has now begun to remove accounts at the request of the U.S. and Israeli governments. Expectedly, the accounts being removed are of people the U.S. and Israeli governments deem opponents, including many Palestinian activists.

WU POLITICAL REVIEW | NATIONAL

Google and Twitter have taken similarly troubling actions, which have included unjustified, partisan bans on Twitter and changes to the Google algorithm that have effectively de-ranked many non-mainstream outlets. Blacklists have also appeared on the internet, one of which labeled around 200 American news outlets as Russian propaganda sites. Between blacklists and bans, it is clear that the attack on “fake news” is not really, or even primarily, an attack on fabricated news stories; it is an attack on dissenting voices.

Actions by Democrats which have spurred these changes to the internet have also sparked legislative and governmental reforms.

The 2017 National Defense Authorization Act included a provision that gives the government greater authority to counter propaganda in order to promote a pro-U.S. narrative.

Additionally, RT America, which is known for its left wing stances and criticisms of U.S. foreign policy, was recently forced to register as a “foreign agent” by the U.S. Department of Justice. The move to designate it as a “foreign agent” would be tantamount to Russia forcing CNN or Fox News to register as “foreign agents” in Russia. After all, mainstream American news outlets are as guilty when it comes to bowing to state power as any state media apparatus.

The role of The New York Times, one of the more respected mainstream news outlets, in pushing the false narrative that led to the 2003 invasion of Iraq provides just one example.

This leads to an important point. As Ron Paul said in an interview with Ed Schultz on RT America, “The fake news comes from our own government.” The American government, along with the mainstream media, is guilty of spreading false narratives to an extent that a Russian propagandist on Facebook could only dream of.

So, in a sense, Trump is actually pointing out a truth when he labels the media as “fake news.”

Of course, he is far too broad in his labeling and often dismisses stories that are credible as “fake news” simply because he does not want to talk about them. But the sentiment he evokes in his statements about “fake news” is attractive because it is often true.

As many have noticed, most notably Glenn Greenwald, “fake news” has become something of a propaganda term, much like “terrorism,” where there is not a clear definition and

those making attacks on it tend to do so from an extremely hypocritical standpoint. Whether it is Trump branding the attacks from the media as “fake news,” or the Democrats whining about the non-existent pervasiveness of “fake news” on social media, these attacks are highly dangerous. There is a clear and simple way to stop the spread of “fake news,” and that certainly does not include censorship. To steal and re-apply a famous line by Noam Chomsky about terrorism to the current predicament of “fake news”: There is an easy way to stop the spread of “fake news”; stop engaging in it. To those who cite the bullet fired by a North Carolina man into a D.C. restaurant as the danger of social media “fake news,” I cite over 100,000 civilians killed in the Iraq War as the danger of mainstream media “fake news.”

If mainstream media outlets are serious about stopping the spread of “fake news,” they need to stop pushing false narratives, including the one they are pushing now about Russian interference in the 2016 election, a topic on which they have made and spread countless claims that have turned out to be patently false. A recent example occurred in December when CNN broke the bombshell news that the Trump campaign had received early access from Wikileaks to the DNC leaks only to have to retract their claims later the same day.

Missing the bigger picture and calling for censorship of “fake news” on social media sets a dangerous precedent. Endorsement of censorship opens the door for the government and private corporations to curtail civil liberties, which will ultimately lead not just to the suppression of supposed factual inaccuracies, but also to the curtailment of free speech for the

fringes of society, limiting any debate to the respectable window allowed by the country’s elites. Opposition voices on both the left and the right will be drowned out with the mainstream opinion being deemed the only one worth airing. Even if one president will not use “fake news” legislation to do great harm, it is inevitable that someone who comes along will. Does this not seem like a far graver danger than having occasional, or even frequent, unsubstantiated rumors circulated on the internet?

Those who are most likely to believe “fake news” stories are people who already have crazy beliefs. Most people who are even the slightest bit skeptical probably will not believe that Hillary was running a child sex ring out of a pizza shop in D.C. The idea that banning “fake news” will somehow make these people less likely to hold crazy beliefs and act in crazy ways is itself crazy.

However, the idea that banning “fake news” will lead to government censorship of dissenting opinions is not; it is gravely serious. One need look no further than not too distant American history, to the time of the House Un-American Activities Committee, to see where a new era of censorship, based largely off of a neo-McCarthyite, Russophobic movement, may lead us.

Conor Smyth ‘21 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. He can be reached at c.smyth@wustl.edu.

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WU POLITICAL REVIEW | NATIONAL

DON’T LOSE THE FIGHTS YOU PICK Daniel Smits, staff editor | Photo courtesy of Unsplash

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reaking news cascades at a breakneck pace in this interminable 24-hours news cycle. Scandals come and go in the blink of an eye. Political careers are ended left, right, and center. The global order seems to teeter on the edge of catastrophe. As engaged citizens, one must take the time to filter, analyze, and contextualize the state of politics in Washington in order to avoid getting dragged into prevalent alarmist rhetoric. Social media, cable news, and polarized media feed off of populist instincts and ideological echo-chambers. It is all too easy to steep in whichever interpretation of current events is à la mode in one’s political circles, whether that be that Democrats hijacked the government or that Trump’s tirade caused the recent government shutdown.

I take this opportunity to pause and reflect on the government shutdown that, by the time you are reading this, will already be a distant memory.

Both sides of the aisle were quick to denounce the other party, spinning their series of events in hope of maintaining face despite Washington’s failure to function. Both Republicans and Democrats hoped to win the “blame game,” turning popular sentiment against the opposing party for allowing the shutdown. Only one party, however, is responsible for the shutdown. Any thoughtful analysis of the events leading up to the shutdown reveals that Democrats managed to lose a shutdown for which they themselves are responsible.

This may be surprising to readers who exist primarily within a liberal ecosystem. The most common defense of Democrats is, “How can we be to blame? After all, the Republicans are in control of all three branches of government.”

This argument is convincing on the surface, but quickly disintegrates upon further analysis: firstly, that the judiciary leans to the right is not to be conflated with being “controlled by Republicans.”

Republicanism is a party and conservatism is an ideology. They are not interchangeable, especially not in the age of Trump. Secondly, that the executive is currently in Republican control does not excuse the legislature from fulfilling its obligations and keeping the government afloat. It is Congress’ job to pass budgeting legislation, not

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Donald Trump’s. The president’s inflammatory rhetoric does not excuse Congress of its responsibilities or justify an abandonment of bipartisan dialogue. Thirdly, Republicans currently hold a majority in the Senate with 51 seats. The stopgap legislation in question, however, requires 60 votes to pass. Cooperation is necessary. To criticize Republicans for not passing this budget single-handedly undermines the importance of bipartisanship, incentivizes party-line voting, and discourages cross-aisle collaboration.

Democrats are responsible for the shutdown because they initially voted against legislation that they actually supported. Democrats had no qualm with any clause of the bill; this is evidenced by the fact that Democrats capitulated and voted in favor of an unchanged bill. There was nothing objectionable within the budget proposition. Since the original legislation had nothing disagreeable to Democrats, why did they allow the government shutdown?

Senate Democrats were willing to use the government budget as a bargaining chip in the ongoing immigration debate, since there is an innate bias against Republicans during—and after—a shutdown. After all, Republicans are in favor of less government. A shutdown seems contrary to Democratic principles of big-government, so they could afford such a destructive risk since the Republicans will take the initial blame. This “strawrepublican” aside, the Democrats knew that anti-Republican bias in shutdowns and Trump’s thoughtless comments

would grant them a small window to push an immigration agenda by holding the government hostage. After all, most Americans do support DACA and are interested in immigration reform.

At the same time, a disproportionate majority of Americans value a functioning government (which effects everyone) more than DACA funding (which only effects about 0.2 percent of individuals in the U.S.).

Although post-shutdown polls indicate that Democrats dodged the brunt of the blame for this debacle, it is unclear how the shutdown will play out in the upcoming midterm elections. The Democrats have founded their 2018 midterm strategy on unstable ground. They are primarily running on anti-Trump platforms, but platforms founded on opposition come with an expiration date. Momentum of such movements quickly dissipates without continuous force. Instead of proposing positive policy solutions to pressing problems, Democrats stoke fervor against Trump and the Republicans that allowed his rise to power. They squabble over identity politics rather than addressing practical issues or the ideological rifts in the party. The left continues to move further left, straining the entire political spectrum. If there truly is a “blue wave” coming in the 2018 midterms, the new Democratic majority may soon find itself at the helm of a ship that it is responsible for sinking.

Daniel Smits ‘21 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. He can be reached at danielsmits@wustl.edu.

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WU POLITICAL REVIEW | INTERNATIONAL

INTERNATIONAL

I SUPPORT ISRAEL. THE JERUSALEM CAPITAL DECLARATION WAS WRONG Ryan Mendelson, staff writer

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rump’s December announcement that the U.S. would move its embassy to Jerusalem and recognize the city as Israel’s official capital reversed decades of U.S. policy and has yielded more questions than answers. Even though the administration still claims to value the possibility of a two-state solution, this declaration is a clear statement of one-sided support. As American supporters of Israel—and Israelis themselves—praise these decisions, it is important to understand that the political consequences of the statement’s rhetoric can be harmful both to the global perception of Israel and to the United States’ role in the peace process.

In my view, there are three arguments for why Trump made this decision. The first argument is that Trump seeks to remain loyal to those who elected him. Trump’s temperament is dictated by how he believes he is perceived, so it makes sense that he would appeal to his right-leaning evangelical base. But while this argument is sound, it does not really get us anywhere.

The second argument for this decision is that it would promote peace in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The president’s speech following the announcement indicated that he believes this.

He claimed that, "After more than two decades of waivers, we are no closer to a lasting peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. It would be folly to assume that repeating the exact same formula would now produce a different or better result.” It takes no genius to see why this argument is flawed. Of course, America’s current policy approach to Israel has not yielded progress, but there is no reason why this decision would yield any more. To believe that rupturing the policy norm will aid the peace process, only because

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our historical strategy has not worked, is the purest example of logical fallacy.

The third, and most interesting, argument is that Trump’s declaration is a show of support to one of the United States’ key allies. But is preserving our allied relationships truly a priority for Trump? It certainly doesn’t seem to be. On the foreign policy front, Trump has strained some of our nation’s most important diplomatic relationships by blaming Mexico, bashing NATO, and clinging to Russia. It would be one thing if Trump decided to support Israel to reflect a pattern of strong commitment to supporting our allies, but this is not the case. Trump’s unilateral support of Israel as an ally to the United States in this instance is not consistent with his foreign policy strategy to date.

Why is this announcement so important? While the fate of Jerusalem is by no means uncontested, U.S. policy on the subject has simply been a norm for decades. Until this decision, recent debates on Israeli settlements in the West Bank, the dividing fences, and Israeli military policy have taken precedent as the most pressing issues against Israel in the peace process. The decision of the US to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s undisputed capital, however, is a strongman move that will not yield positive policy change. Regardless of the specificities involved, the rhetoric of this announcement suggests that neither the U.S. nor Israel has any interest in the peace process; the 67 percent of Israelis that support U.S. leadership under Trump certainly seems to support this notion. Trump took a political norm—a status quo of sorts—and turned it into a contentious issue. His declaration has already generated frustration and anger among Israel’s neighbors. With Jordan,

for example, Vice President Pence’s late-January meeting with King Abdullah indicated a difficult way forward in the peace process.

In sum, this change in U.S. policy is detrimental for all parties involved. It is bad for the Palestinians because it promotes the idea that Israel and the U.S. are working against them and do not seek to make peace; this sentiment has the potential to further incite radicalism in the region and increase anti-Semitic sentiments. It is bad for Israel because it fuels the global narrative against it and challenges its relationships with other nations; it puts Jordan, Israel’s friendliest neighbor, in a difficult position as an important broker within the effort to promote peace. Finally, it is bad for the U.S., as it threatens the American role as a global diplomatic power. This decision does not accomplish anything productive, nor does it represent a true valuable policy shift.

I will conclude by reiterating that I am a supporter of Israel, and I do recognize its right to exist. As a Jewish state at the crux of the world’s Abrahamic faiths, however, Israel is routinely under more scrutiny than its neighbors.

Although the Israeli right undoubtedly embraces this recognition from the U.S., Israel must tread lightly. The man in charge of this decision is proud of his ability to make deals, but this deal is a bad one. It would be shortsighted, particularly for supporters of Israel, to celebrate it.

Ryan Mendelson ’19 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. He can be reached at ryanmendelson@wustl.edu.

WU POLITICAL REVIEW | INTERNATIONAL

THE RESURRECTION OF FORMER COMMUNIST LEADERS Luke Voyles, staff writer | Illustration by Sarah Davis

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oted civil rights activist and feminist scholar Dr. Angela Davis gave a lecture at Washington University in St. Louis on Jan. 24. She spoke about how American society continually allows sexual predators positions of power through not giving women the respect that they deserved as human beings.

Her speech visibly moved the audience, which erupted into cheers at the conclusion of the event. Throughout half a century of activism, Dr. Davis provided her incredible insights through marvelous oratory. Nevertheless, in 1984 and in 1988, it would have seemed strange to many Americans to see Dr. Davis give a speech that provoked such passionate support. The reason for such scenarios is that in both of the aforementioned years Dr. Davis ran as the vice presidential nominee for the Communist Party.

Dr. Davis is by no means the only leader to stage a political comeback after being a loyal Communist leader. President Denis SassouNguesso of the Republic of the Congo has held that post since 1997, but he attempted to convince the Congolese public that he was close with president-elect and businessman Donald Trump in 2016 in a photoshopped image.

Despite Sassou-Nguesso’s current pro-capitalist stance, he first achieved power in his country when it was called the People’s Republic of the Congo as a communist leader from 1979 to 1992. Another African nation, Benin, received its name from a former communist leader. Mathieu Kerekou was a military officer who overthrew Dahomey’s (now Benin’s) triumviral government of Justin AhomadegbeTometin, Hubert Maga, and Sourou-Migan Apithy. Kerekou transformed the nation into a communist state while renaming it for a powerful empire that had existed in Nigeria in the pre-colonial period. He ruled as a communist dictator from 1972 to 1991, but he changed his tone in 1990. In that year, he begged for the forgiveness of the Beninois people in a public confession of the excesses and crimes of his authoritarian regime given to Archbishop Isidore de Souza of Cotonou. He left office after

being defeated by Nicephore Soglo in the 1991 presidential election. However, Kerekou regained power in 1996 through the next presidential election on a platform of encouraging Christianity throughout the country until his retirement in 2006. Another publically devoted Christian leader to regain power after being a committed Marxist-Leninist was President Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua. He ran a leftist (albeit non-Communist) government (1979-1990) that found itself drawn to the Soviet bloc at the height of the Cold War during the 1980s. Unlike Sassou-Nguesso and Kerekou, Ortega allowed two democratic elections during the aforementioned tenure.

He lost in the presidential election of 1990, but returned to power in 2006 as a social conservative and political leftist, and he remains in control of the Nicaraguan presidency.

Of the three former Marxist-Leninist heads of state to become a head of state democratically in a multiparty state, all drastically changed their images to obtain election to the highest offices of their respective countries.

Some leaders did not even have to leave power.

Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan, Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan, Saparmurat Niyazov of Turkemenistan, Jose Eduardo dos Santos of Angola, and Joaquim Chissano of Mozambique maintained control over their countries even when they finally allowed their countries to establish multiparty democracies and when the leaders themselves renounced their former commitment to communism. Dr. Davis left the Communist Party in 1991 and never once discussed her affiliation with the party throughout her lecture at Graham Chapel. For many of the people at Graham Chapel, they might have had no knowledge of Dr. Davis’s former association

with and leadership within the Communist Party.

Dr. Davis’s abandonment of the party has not stopped her from criticizing capitalist economics as exploitative to marginalized ethnic and gender communities. At Graham Chapel, she stated that a revolution might be necessary to rid American society of oppressive habits and institutions. However, she famously ignored some of the most marginalized of voices when she refused to join Czechoslovak dissident Jiri Pelikan’s cries for justice against the communist government of Czechoslovakia in 1972.

She agreed to be photographed next to Erich Honecker of East Germany, Fidel Castro of Cuba, and Todor Zhivkov of Bulgaria. None of those leaders ever allowed free and multiparty elections in their countries. Dr. Davis’s commitment to a communist worldview superseded individual rights that are normally guaranteed in a multiparty democracy, as conservatives such as William F. Buckley, Jr. ignored the authoritarian rule of Augusto Pinochet because it suited their pro-capitalist and traditionalist ends in the international arena. The ideology of communism gave her a specific goal toward which she could aspire: the classless society. When her dream collapsed with the fall of the Soviet government and many of its satellites, she embraced intersectional feminism. Other former leaders sought political power to fill in the void communism filled. Dr. Davis forgot that political power and intersectionality are simply tools to build a better society, and not eschatological visions that satisfy anybody in the long run.

Luke Voyles ’18 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences.He can be reached at lrvoyles@wustl.edu.

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