F R I D A Y MARCH 14, 2003
THE BROWN DAILY HERALD Volume CXXXVIII, No. 36
An independent newspaper serving the Brown community since 1891
www.browndailyherald.com
Students off network for file-sharing BY LOTEM ALMOG
Last week alone, 67 Brown students temporarily lost their Internet privileges on the Brown network for illegally sharing files. “Filtering” students off the Internet has increased substantially in 2003 due to the increase in complaints of illegal file-sharing filed by such organizations as Universal Studios and the Recording Industry Association of America, said Connie Sadler, director of information technology security. Illegally sharing movies, music or software over the Brown network has become a liability issue for the University, Sadler said. “Potentially, Brown could be fined a lot of money. This is not one of those issues Brown wants to be a test case for,” she said. Currently, the organizations making the complaints have identified Internet Protocol addresses, which are unique to each computer. They send the complaints to Brown citing the specific computers containing the illegal files, Sadler said. “It has come to our attention that the Internet site(s) located below, for which Brown University is a service provider, is offering unauthorized copies of the Universal Motion Pictures,” said one such complaint. “It’s not that Brown caught me, some lawyers from Sony caught me, and they sent an e-mail to Brown demanding that I delete the movie,” said Tal Itzkovich ’06, who was filtered after Brown received a complaint from Sony regarding his possession of the movie “Minority Report.” Computing and Information Services has no way of knowing to whom the IP address belongs, Sadler said. Accordingly, the only measure the University can take to protect itself against a potential copyright infringement suit is to disconnect that specific computer from the network, she said.
Jason White / Herald
Magdalen Hsu-Li told an audience in Salomon her music provides a medium for reconnecting with aspects of Chinese culture.
Hsu-Li plays with confidence, comedy BY JOANNE PARK
Gracing the stage with confidence and comic aplomb, Chinese-American painter, poet, singer and songwriter Magdalen Hsu-Li entertained with songs from her two albums, “Fire” and “Evolution,” intermittently injecting her performance with personal musings about being viewed as a “bad Asian girl.” “I like the idea that you can see many different things in a lifetime,” Hsu-Li said, setting the tone for a concert that
addressed aspects of feminism, being an Asian American and coming to terms with one’s sexuality. After graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design, Hsu-Li moved to Seattle and began her career as a musician. Her last two albums have garnered critical acclaim, including the Gay and Lesbian American Music Award for “Monkey Girl” and have brought her increasing visibility and popularity. Hsu-Li, who is bisexual, opened the
concert with “Redefinition,” a selfaffirming piece in which she describes herself as “yellow with pride and white at the gills / Black with anger and burning with skills / Red with passion and brown with age.” Songs ranged from the politically and socially conscious “Divided States” and “Spirit of the World” to the personal “Assimilated” and “As I Am.” The set also included a piece titled “Evolution,” see MUSIC, page 4
see FILE-SHARING, page 5
In a nutshell, everyone is black, argues Gordon BY GEORGE HAWS
Everyone’s black, Professor Lewis Gordon told participants in an open forum Thursday night. “If you were to imagine being in a time machine and imagined going back 36,000 years ago, who would appear morphologically similar (to modern hominids)?” he asked. “About 35,000 years ago there were no white people,” he said. “Everybody in this room is a variation of the people known as ‘black people.’ In a nutshell, y’all are black.” Gordon, a professor of Africana studies, examined this and other race-related issues, in his lecture “Whiteness: Where do we go from here?” held in Wilson 302. Gordon defined race as “a mode of differentiation that we have through the history of (geographic) separation and isolation” that becomes misconstrued “when we try to impute to race the notion of values. There is nothing intrinsic to our racial definitions that make us good or bad, smart or stupid, whatever you may
use.” Several participants said the term “race” was merely a social construct used to either oppress or classify people. Gordon, however, disagreed. “I think discussion about race has been dominated by politics that are more interested in getting people to recite certain things rather than truth,” he said. Taking a Darwinian perspective, Gordon said races evolved due to the different amounts of the sun’s ultraviolet radiation received on different parts of the planet. When moving into northerly latitudes, “if you don’t become lighter, … you get rickets” because the human body produces less vitamin D, he said. Conversely, those who live in regions where higher quantities of ultraviolet radiation penetrate the earth’s atmosphere must remain darker in skin tone to avoid getting skin cancers, he said. “We have to take seriously (the fact that) we’re not just a social group — we are finely tuned biological creatures.
“The reason we can see differences in the way we see each other is because we are members of the same species. ... We are a knowledge species, which means that we have the acute ability to make distinctions,” he said. Gordon emphasized, “it is important to address the question of ‘whiteness’ without the definition of privilege.” He said academics define privilege. “In short, the existence of horrible things in the world means that if there are good things in the world, we shouldn’t have (them),” he said. What he called the “Try to create white guilt syndrome,” which attempts to elicit guilt in whites over simply being white, was no more than a projection of this definition of privilege onto the idea of whiteness, he added. Gordon advocated a constructive stance when asked about how to end racism in contemporary society. “Try to choose things that you really can do,” he
Rites & Reason’s simple and emotional work “SOLD!” features social critique arts and culture,page 3
Mike Benisch ’04 criticizes cases of “misplaced anger” with French fries opinions, page 9
BY ALEX PALMER
Life at Brown has proven to be difficult at best for the University’s few Native American students, according to the Native Americans at Brown members who met last night to discuss the future of Natives in academia. The panel, titled “The Knowledge of North American Indigenous Peoples in the Academy” and hosted by NAB and Evelyn Hu-DeHart, director of the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America, addressed the difficulties Native students face at a university with no Native American professors, let alone a department for Native American studies. Panel attendees said they needed Native American professors to act as role models
see GORDON, page 5
I N S I D E F R I D AY, M A RC H 1 4 , 2 0 0 3 Adaptation of Dickens’ play, “Drood” proves amusing Musical Forum production arts and culture,page 3
Life difficult for Native American Brown students
see NATIVES, page 5
TO D AY ’ S F O R E C A S T John Brougher ’04 says same-sex marriages should be legal in the United States opinions, page 11
Men’s icers head to Yale and women’s hockey hosts Harvard in ECAC Playoffs sports, page 12
partly cloudy high 30 low 16