We’re marching out of the dorm we do not share. We’re not interested in being inside anymore. By way of the door, out. We got dressed in our winter’s best: platform docs, ran through converse. No. Gloves. We don’t have time. We’re running through the door! We’re thinking. We’re thinking real hard. No, scratch that. We’re fire horses. You’re fired! Pack your shit and go. Okay, okay, we’re going. We’ll go. We’re going out-of-doors. All of the order we want in our lives is already outside waiting for us. Out the house, out your body, out your head. Out is in! We’re fire horses on the outs. We’re horses with no names: we’re out of this town. We’re in and of Providence: we’re trudging through the icy sludge on the ground. Snapsnapsnap. We feel that, properly, our house is the big out-of-doors. By the way, we’re still horses. We thought we were running in an open field. We’re not, though. We’re back again.
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STAFF WRITERS
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*Our Beloved Staff
MISSION STATEMENT
The College Hill Independent is a Providence-based publication written, illustrated, designed, and edited by students from Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design. Our paper is distributed throughout the East Side, Downtown, and online. The Indy also functions as an open, leftist, consciousness-raising workshop for writers and artists, and from this collaborative space we publish 20 pages of politically-engaged and thoughtful content once a week. We want to create work that is generative for and accountable to the Providence community—a commitment that needs consistent and persistent attention.
While the Indy is predominantly financed by Brown, we independently fundraise to support a stipend program to compensate staff who need financial support, which the University refuses to provide. Beyond making both the spaces we occupy and the creation process more accessible, we must also work to make our writing legible and relevant to our readers.
The Indy strives to disrupt dominant narratives of power. We reject content that perpetuates homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, misogyny, ableism and/ or classism. We aim to produce work that is abolitionist, anti-racist, anti-capitalist, and anti-imperialist, and we want to generate spaces for radical thought, care, and futures. Though these lists are not exhaustive, we challenge each other to be intentional and self-critical within and beyond the workshop setting, and to find beauty and sustenance in creating and working together.
Week in
PLOWI NG
c This week, since the snowstorm (which one of my more acculturated friends told me has to do something with North Eastern), I have been wading through thigh-high, gelatinous, sloppy, unfriendly, sharp ice on my way to school, work, and home. I am so over it. I hate to be the guy who gives too much lip service to the weather but consider me a hypocrite because, oh my god, this shit sucks.
In Russian, there is a great word—сугроб ([sʊˈɡrop])—it roughly translates to big pile of nasty, dirty snow pushed to the side and left to thaw out until March and/or April. There is no equivalent term in English: maybe a snow bank or a snow drift, but neither is able to convey the same abject condition of a city consumed by the worst of the winter as сугроб
The term carries weight. It describes a particular phenomenon any city dweller and suburban mall visitor knows well. A Сугроб must be taller than children, if not just below height of an average woman (in heels), and it not only can but is required to take up at least a couple city blocks at a time. They are quite customizable, coming in a variety of colors, including Smoke Grey, Petroleum Black, and Confusingly Yellow—never white. They always smell eerily sulfuric, wafting at you as you try to cross the street. Сугроб is Сугроб and she takes over a city block like a cold sore for the duration of anywhere from a week to six months.
Usually when a word in one language doesn’t have a linguistic equivalent in another language, it is because it doesn’t have use in the culture (I made that up, I am suspicious of linguistics and think that language is mostly just words, and signal is signifier and so on and so forth). In this case it’s something quite different, because I regret to inform you that Providence has officially become, almost entirely, the сугробiest сугроб of them all.
I am deeply disturbed by the inconvenience, so this time, I am practically paralyzed. I know not one, not two, but eight to ten people who have gotten concussions from slipping on ice. That’s like NFL statistics of brain damage. We can’t afford any more brain cells lost in this country—not now, not ever again. It takes me 50 minutes to go to the supermarket, and on my way back I have to use bags of tortilla chips as snow shoes and a stack of bean cans as poles. There is salt in my sneakers, my jean pockets, and even my wounds. I haven’t seen a curb in two weeks. I am pissed off and annoyed. I like curbs because they remind me that most roads lead to beginnings and ends.
When it snows, the city becomes paralyzed, and not even time can move on. It’s been six days since my neighbour picked up her newspaper. It’s been two weeks since I watched a girl barf in a bush outside of an office building. She seemed mostly okay, but in the process she lost an eyelash extension. Today, it’s
still there, outside of the TEXTRON headquarters, suspended as in an epoxy container, together with her scrambled insides.
It’s been seven and a half years since I have gone to the dentist.
More anecdotes! A few days ago, my roommates and I, who had been hibernating obediently with no plans to move any muscles until there was spring, came to the unfortunate realization that soon, we would have to brave the outdoors. The truth was we needed to eat, and we were left with a few egg noodles, a string of string cheese, and a handful of discarded Halloween candy deemed by parents to be too unsafe to be eaten by children. We needed to go to the grocery store, so why not take the car that was parked right under our nose? Oh, how foolish we were. We are dumb FUCKS. Our idiot asses made the rookie mistake of thinking we could have shit on сугроб. She wasn’t having any of our naive pretentions, she was prepared to wage war.
When we walked out the back door and onto our drive way, we were met with an Olympic-sized ice rink. Stalactites and stalagmites the size of war-waging torpedoes poked at us menacingly from every which way. In the absence of shovels, we used a Swiffer and some forks to dig my roommate’s car “Jimmy” out of the drive way. This took six hours, split over several days.
The ride to the Market Basket, which is juuuuust across the Massachusetts border, took 45 minutes. We had to park in a church yard and plow our way through a crosswalk that was now completely subsumed by the сугроб and her witchy ways. In the store they had nothing worth buying. The shelves were barren, except for the pre-packaged sushi aisle and a giant heap of expired pork shoulder pieces. Damn you сугроб, you have struck once again.
Later in the day, after we had thawed our frozen phalanges under the faint puff of heat that emitted every so often from our broken radiator, we received a missive from our landlord. These are usually bursts of run-on demagoguery which we glance over but mostly ignore. Today we made the mistake of reading the entire message. Uh-oh.
Hi, girls (we are always girls to him) please Move the car over to the right closer to the fence and be extremely careful because i wasn’t able to plow. There is very dangerous ice on the side of your house. People should only be using the front door until the ice clears. I have put ice melted [sic] down but be extremely careful going to the car. It needs to be moved over to the right. All the cars should have been moved but the second floor has taken the Liberty [sic] to block everybody in! Anyway, I digress girls, it’s really been a tough week in the landlording world,
everything is crummy when I don’t have hot cheetos in my tummy~ *
We are still stuck in our house, and our landlord still hasn’t come around to help with the “ice melted.” We’ve resorted to eating each other, one limb at a time.
It is one thing to be a slightly annoyed twentysomething who lets the recycling you aren’t going to take out anyway fester in the Trader Joe's bag under your sink for a few extra days. It is another thing entirely, to be a person with real business, trying to go about your obligations (in the sense of obligatory, as in unavoidable, as in like actually you have no choice), in a situation that doesn’t allow for success.
On the Providence PTA Facebook, a picture of kids crossing the street in front of their elementary school has gone viral. In the image you can see wheelie bags and brightly colored Jansports peeking out from under a сугроб the size of a mountain range in northern France or Japan. The kids are literally climbing to make it to home room, and on either side of them, cars are zooming on clear roads graciously plowed for commuters. Sidewalk slay!
Bus stops are so covered you either have to stand on the road or wait deep into the sidewalk. If you don’t have a parking spot you will get fined and so towed, you might as well change your identity and start your credit history all over, from scratch. Every day, I found new limbs to get frozen, new ways to slip, fall over, plummet, and crash.
In a city where the onus to plow is on property holders, unclaimed land plots end up perpetually subsumed by сугроб. If there is a wall with no entrance, or a house with no clear property manager, tough luck, chump, no ball. We are all looking for it, but I think this might be the only apt metaphor for the American condition. Everybody feels as much responsibility as what is convenient to them.
The streets are unplowed, and the сугроб is mighty. It’s not just unpleasant, but inaccessible. I am tired, I am cold, and I am ready for it to be spring.
*This is a completely real text from the career slumlord who owns our apartment building. I can’t say he hasn’t tried plowing, but he is not exactly good at it. For our pains he has provided us with what looks to be a child’s spade for the beach, and a handful of quarters to make up for the fact that we have used our bath towels to sop up the crusty rust spouting from every single radiator that has tried to turn on in our house. Also, our utilities were almost 700 dollars this last month! I am pissed off. Don’t get me started on gas delivery fees.
SAFE” “NOWHERE IS
Tracing ICE Presence and Concern Across Rhode Island
*For the sake of legal and professional protection, some of the subjects in this article have been anonymized.*
c When undocumented Brown student V prepares for the day, appearance matters more than it does for most. Beyond worries about classes and extracurriculars, V is afraid of two things: Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) sightings and police profiling.
“I’m afraid to be in ‘bummy clothes’ or to go somewhere without my backpack,” V said in an interview with The College Hill Independent . T he increase in ICE detainments in Rhode Island over the past year, compounded by the recent doubling of police and security personnel around Brown’s campus after the mass shooting on December 13, has made V “a lot more scared.”
While most students were able to return home after the shooting, V remained on campus, with a continued feeling of vulnerability. “Anytime I walked around campus, I was scared to dress in a way that could be profiled,” V said. “I worry, like are [the police] looking at me? Are they thinking about me? Am I a person of interest right now?”
The proximity of immigration arrests to Brown has constricted V’s ability to participate in college life without fear. V immediately reads the Rhode Island Deportation Defense Network (DDN) ICE alert channel every time a notification is received. “I have memorized the names of the closest courthouses we have to campus, so I first always check to see if it’s Benefit or Garrahy— Benefit being the one that gives me the most anxiety—to the extent that I’ll avoid anything past the Quiet Green. Even the Main Green [sometimes],” V said.
The Providence/Bristol County Superior Court, here referred to as ‘Benefit’ due to its location on Benefit Street, is approximately a block away from Brown’s Van Wickle Gates. The court has been the site of repeated ICE presence since the summer, as has Providence’s Garrahy Judicial Complex, which is located downtown near 195 District Park.
According to the College Hill Deportation Defense Network (CHDNN), ICE agents have appeared at either Benefit or Garrahy at least once a week this semester, and several times since last semester at the Florence K. Murray Judicial Complex in Newport. Deportation efforts at Garrahy notably gained attention on January 15 when ICE officers, chasing after two men, ran past Garrahy court security without turning in their weapons.
But the environment of fear created by ICE extends beyond Brown University and the downtown courthouses. Increased ICE presence has plagued all spheres of public life. In July 2025, The Providence Journal
reported that ICE had arrested 250 people in Rhode Island—a 182% increase—since the start of President Trump’s second term. This increased ICE presence in RI mirrors the ramped-up enforcement action across the U.S. following his inauguration.
On any given day in January 2025, ICE held roughly 40,000 people in detention facilities nationwide—a number that has since increased by over 75% as of mid-January 2026, according to the American Immigration Council. 104 more centers were also used by ICE for immigration detention by the end of November 2025 than at the start of the year—a 91% increase.
In Rhode Island, the Donald W. Wyatt Detention Facility in Central Falls, considered the “nation’s first publicly-owned, privately-run” detention center renewed for use by ICE in 2019, has reported being at 91% capacity with federal detainees—115 of whom are ICE arrests—as of February 11, 2025.
Legal protection for Rhode Island immigrants traces back to 2014, when Governor Lincoln Chaffee ordered Rhode Island’s Department of Corrections to refuse detainment orders by federal immigration officers unless provided a warrant. While the executive director of the Rhode Island ACLU has previously characterized the ruling as a simple enforcement of Fourth Amendment law, the cities of Providence and Central Falls have taken additional steps to protect immigrants. In 2018, both cities filed a lawsuit against the Department of Justice after former Attorney General Jeff Sessions withheld federal funds due to the cities’ refusal to cooperate with federal immigration orders. The judge’s ruling in favor of Providence and Central Falls settled access to the Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant, but did not stop ICE’s continued activity within the state, or the federal government’s ability to threaten funding through other pathways.
Last May, Trump flagged Rhode Island, placing Providence and Central Falls in a list of “sanctuary” jurisdictions that were at risk of losing federal funding due to their noncompliance with ICE. Despite this, Providence has continued to pass legislation that maintains its sanctuary status. Last November, the Providence City Council passed significant amendments to the Community-Police Relations Act that instituted broader limits on local police cooperation with ICE and banned immigration agents from entering public spaces without a judicial warrant. This January, Mayor Brett Smiley signed an executive order that prohibits federal immigration enforcement action on Providence’s public property.
Around Providence’s parks, parking lots, and municipal buildings, signs now read: “[This property] may not be used as a staging area or for any operations related to civil immigration enforcement.” Still, in Rhode Island, local policy can only hasten state response to what has been interpreted as federal overreach, leaving the state’s residents and public spaces under remaining threat of ICE.
Courthouse and Parking Garages
ICE’s practice of arresting undocumented immigrants at courthouses, which was largely restricted by the
Biden administration’s 2021 guidelines for Enforcement Actions in or Near Courthouses memorandum, and the DDN’s reciprocal weekday monitoring shifts have turned courthouses into flashpoints for enforcement and community defense. For individuals working in and around the courthouses, ICE presence has created an atmosphere of fear and chaos.
B, a public defender, described seeing ICE stake out and forcibly remove a man from a car in a Kent County parking garage after work in the Kent Judicial Complex a few weeks prior. There were “five or six people with automatic weapons,” he observed.
In a courthouse garage in Rhode Island, T, a garage worker told the Indy that ICE shows up “about once a week minimum” for stakeouts and detainments. He explained a specific instance when four ICE agents staked out the garage for hours and forcibly removed a man from his car. “Who’s giving them the right to oper ate where they operate? To camp out on private proper ties and capture people?” he said. “They didn’t ask me [to be in the garage]. They didn’t ask anyone.”
N, a nonprofit attorney, noted the atmosphere of concern ICE has created in the courthouses. “When [ICE operations] happen, I’m on edge,” she said. N argued that ICE in Rhode Island has a “clear intent to terrorize and to scare people.” “That’s not a side effect. It is the purpose,” she said.
The Community response is also palpable at the courthouses. P, a Brown student and CHDDN volunteer, goes to Garrahy “every Friday morning to patrol and outreach.” “Whenever there’s an ICE agent, we mobilize to help get them out of the area,” he explained. The DDN also conducts “outreach to continue spreading the word […] that there is a deportation defense line,” as well as to find signatories for the DDN petition in support of virtual court hearings
P described the real threat of ICE presence at courthouses when on February 6, he “made sure a mom and two kids left the courthouse safely” after the CHDDN was alerted that ICE was near Garrahy. ICE was later confirmed be at the Amtrak/MBTA station, a five-minute drive away from Garrahy.
“I think you can’t ever really be prepared for the shock that ensues in your body when ICE [is] encountered [and chased out]” P shared, “But it’s also very rewarding when it does happen.” P noted the successful mobilization around the attempted detainment of a 16-year-old intern at Benefit on November 24 as an example.
Since February 6, the CHDDN has recorded three ICE vehicle sightings near Garrahy, one of which involved ICE officers detaining a person at the courthouse for the first time this year.
Maya Lehrer, an organizer with the Rhode Island branch of the Party for Socialism and Liberation and volunteer with the DDN, describes the network as “the biggest asset that we’ve got at the moment.” “Our ability to turn out 30, 40, 50, sometimes 100 people to a place where ICE is, and make it so that we’re loud, we’re protesting or telling people in our neighborhoods […] so that we know where ICE is at all times […] has been the most effective,” she shared.
Still, ICE continues to show up at Providence
courthouses. R, an attorney who works at Garrahy about four days a week, has seen ICE at the courthouse several times over the past few months. This, to him, shows a disregard for civilian safe spaces. “People should be able to go anywhere without fear of being taken away,” he said.
“They
Went Into the Hospital”
Melissa Ballard, a 45-year-old resident of Woonsocket, characterized ICE’s presence in Rhode Island as “out of control.” In Woonsocket, ICE presence is monitored through the North Providence channel of the DDN, which as reported ICE sightings in the region since the summer. A mother of six from Woonsocket was also notably detained at Boston Logan International Airport and confirmed to still be in custody this past January, despite possessing a renewed green card and having lived in the U.S. for over 30 years.
Her concerns were amplified this past April when she saw ICE agents remove a man from Rhode Island Hospital’s emergency unit while at the Hasbro Children’s pediatric division with her 13-year-old son. “I thought it was just police at first […but] there were protestors like the ones in the [Garrahy] courthouse everywhere,” she said. On her way home, she recounted the experience to her Lyft driver, shocked. “They went into the hospital,” she told him.
The incident Ballard witnessed refers to the detainment of a man at Rhode Island Hospital, who was admitted after ICE subdued him with a taser outside his home in Providence. More than 80 reported protestors from the Rhode Island Deportation Defense Network came in solidarity, intending to delay ICE operations long enough for the man to contact his family and legal counsel—the latter of which ICE prevented the man from using despite a signed form from his lawyer confirming his legal representation.
To C, a teacher living on College Hill and member of the DDN, the importance of the network in combatting ICE raids cannot be understated: “These non-official ways of protecting each other such as the DDN [are] the most tangible way to help each other.”
Lehrer agreed, underscoring the hospital incident as an example. “It’s been a time where the stakes of organizing our communities have become very clear as we’ve had to confront the realities of people being kidnapped in broad daylight from our neighborhoods,” she emphasized.
To Melissa, the situation served as an example of the threat ICE poses to the Rhode Island community. “They can’t just go inside where people need help and just take someone,” Melissa said. “Why can’t [immigrant] families get the medical attention they need [without fear of ICE]?”
Schools
Within schools, the threat of ICE increasingly looms over teachers, faculty, and students. On January 21, 2025, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) released two directives: the first rescinded the Biden
“It has to be all of us”
Administration’s 2021 memorandum, effectively removing the protected status of “schools, hospitals or churches under DHS enforcement policy.” The second directive ended what DHS deems “the broad abuse of humanitarian parole” by returning the program to a “case-by-case basis.”
In response, on January 27, 2025, Attorney General Peter F. Neronha and the Rhode Island Department of Education released guidance for schools , utilizing governing laws such as the federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act and the Rhode Island Educational Records Bill of Rights. Within the response, schools were urged to continue to protect the rights of every student by prohibiting “all unauthorized visitors, including federal law enforcement officers without a judicial warrant or court order” and not disclosing information to third parties, “including federal immigration authorities.”
Still, C noted that ICE continues to cause a feeling of “threat and fear” across Providence. Within her school board, “that was a concern: How are schools prepared to respond if federal agents try to get information and seek people out?” “[People in other neighborhoods have] seen agents try to take people, they’ve seen suspicious cars. People are starting to sense apprehension,” she said.
C expressed concern for “immigrant and newcomer students” as well, reasoning they are more susceptible to ICE interactions considering they “[travel] across the city on their own”—something that happened late last spring to a high schooler on a bus at Kennedy Plaza, according to the DDN. She also mentioned a lack of support from school district leaders on setting tangible practices to combat ICE. “There’s a difference between paper versus practice,” she said. “In terms of what’s actually being done, it’s really individual teachers, people, and staff who are taking these threats more seriously.”
L, another Providence teacher, agreed, emphasizing the lack of proactive protection her school is receiving from its administration. “It’s scary, because we aren’t being trained on what to do when this happens […] It feels like we’re all just sitting ducks.”
L spoke of students struggling “to accept that [detainments are] happening to people who look like them” and teachers unable to address their experiences “in a classroom space.” “I think that frustrates teachers sometimes. You know, there’s real things happening,” she sighed. “It makes me really sad [the kids] are growing up like this.”
While ICE has not been present at her school, L said they have been “around other schools nearby.” “Rhode island is so small that something happening 15 minutes away—we’re not removed from [it].” L said. She paused. “Do I think this will extend to every corner of all schools? Yes. It’s not a crazy idea for them to show up here.”
“[Change] gets so much messier, harder, and so much more frustrating [at the state level]. So I just focus on the individual level,” C told the Indy. She considers her individual contributions to be her DDN membership and attendance at the College Hill strike on Friday, January 30, as part of the “Stand with Minnesota: ICE Out!” national day of action.
The strike amassed over 1,000 protestors, many of them students, indicating to Lehrer that “people are really starting to see themselves [within] a nationwide movement.”
“The Minneapolis general strike galvanized a lot of people,” Lehrer said, in reference to the strike organized by small businesses in Minneapolis on January 23, a week prior,“transforming what had already been an outpouring of support from millions of people [nationwide…] into something […] more concrete, as far as collective economic action [goes].”
Dakota Johnson B’26 agreed, emphasizing that “Every major action, every major stand […] is made up of a bunch of ordinary people deciding to be brave […] It has to be all of us.”
For some protestors, being brave included participating despite their undocumented status. V shared that their attendance was never a question of if, but of how “[I’ve] gone to other protests before. I felt I shouldn’t limit myself to not go to this one just because it’s about me this time. I feel it’s even more important for me to go.”
Hailing from a family of Caribbean immigrants, Laurence Nunes B’27 expressed that his family has felt they have “too much to lose to be involved [in ICE protests].” However, Nunes believes not participating would be wasting “the unique kind of institutional power” Brown affords him as an Ivy League student. “We may have things to lose, but we have way more to gain from working with each other and being involved in the movement,” he said.
In addition to the sanctuary policies that Providence and Rhode Island currently have on the books, there are additional efforts underway to fortify the rights of immigrants through legislation. On February 11, the Immigration Coalition of Rhode Island held a press conference in support of a number of bills that are currently being considered by the Rhode Island legislature. One termed the ‘364 bill’ would reduce the maximum sentence carried by many charges from a year to 364 days, thereby avoiding immigration penalties associated with convictions that carry a sentence of a year or more. Another would allow low-income families who are lawful permanent residents to access cash assistance and work support sooner, and a third would limit the ability of federal immigration officials to operate without a judicial warrant in courthouses.
Advocating for the sustained importance of the DDN, C said “To the extent possible I think declaring sanctuary zones—schools, hospitals, etc.—should be a given […] But how can we enforce and honor it?” Johnson agreed, highlighting that as of right now, “Nowhere is safe. College isn’t safe, courts aren’t safe, church isn’t safe, school isn’t safe.”
PICK AND PICK AGAIN
ON BANJOTILLOMANIA
c In the folk and bluegrass world, musicians who play plucked string instruments (guitar, banjo, mandolin) are often convivially referred to as pickers. I pick a Gold Tone banjo, a slim, midrange model which I bought at a steep discount from a retired Cirque du Soleil clown. It has a glossy polished neck and a synthetic hide head, worn translucent in two spots that my right hand touches. I play a style of folk music called old-time—a genre which consists of American fiddle tunes, mostly instrumental, mostly sourced from old field recordings, mostly from Appalachia, and mostly in tune.
An internet search for “banjo addict” returns a 2022 thread from Banjo Hangout, an online forum with a nostalgically unfrilly interface where five-string freaks like me gather to discuss the finer points of our favorite chordophone. “Hello my name is Ray and I am a banjo addict. (insert Hi Ray here),” confesses a user called Rays Pickin Shed. “It all started […] when a 3 year old boy (ME) was watching the Andy Griffith show in 1966...”
Hi, Ray! I too am addicted to playing the banjo. But I was a compulsive picker well before I had ever heard of old-time music. I began with my own skin.
It was perhaps in the third grade when I realized the tissue of my inner lip would regenerate no matter how much I bit at it. A nervous child in search of a repository for my anxious energy, I turned inward and started systematically destroying the inside of my own mouth with my teeth until I bled. Tender white sores, which were sensitive to the acid of oranges or salt and vinegar chips and would take a week to heal, bubbled up from the bitten spots. The sores were not contagious, but they were gross. They would shrink over time, vanishing into the flesh of my lip, and then I would pick them back until they bled again. Why? Because the feeling of nicking the inside of my lip over and over brought me a perverse feeling of calm and contentment.
I’ve never really stopped looking for ways to ease my worries through the excoriation of my body. A similar compulsion, a desire to self-soothe through repeated gestures, is satisfied by playing clawhammer banjo, with the upside that the banjo can make lovely music when you pick it. This is what some call a healthy coping mechanism.
Picking is not something you do just once: just as you pick many apples from an orchard until you have a whole bushel, your pick strikes the strings of a guitar or mandolin multiple times per second as you play a melody. Dermatillomania is not only the compulsive desire to pick at the skin; it is the desire to open and continually reopen a closing wound in an endless loop of rupture and healing. It’s the repetition, the picking again, that gives the act its significance. Repetition is also central to the practice of playing old-time banjo. Old-time music is realized through repetition on three levels: in the transmission of traditional fiddle tunes from player to player and generation to generation; in the performance conventions of those tunes; and in the physical mechanics of playing the instruments.
The central repertoire of this musical tradition is the fiddle tune. According to the romantic mythology of the American folk tradition, many of the oldest tunes have been transmitted from their original creators through a long mimetic chain of playing and copying. Fiddle tunes are (or ought to be) taught
( TEXT DINA PFEFFER
DESIGN JENNIE KWON
ILLUSTRATION AVARI ESCOBAR )
and learned by ear, a method which requires a learner to listen to a friend or mentor play, and to repeat back what they hear until the learner, too, becomes a master of the tune. Through this process of aural transmission, the tune repeats and resounds alike in every subsequent generation. The myth of heritage is the myth of a continuous loop. Fiddle tunes are always performed in a loop. A tune is usually quite short, perhaps 16 or 32 bars, and usually split into an A and B (and sometimes C or D) section. They are not meant to be played one time; they emerge from the square dancing tradition, for which the tunes function as looping backing tracks. At jam sessions, participants play a single tune together in unison, repeating it over and over, sometimes 10 times or more, only ceasing when someone kicks a foot up to cue the group to stop. As the tune goes around and around, the musicians coalesce, the groove tightens. The jam jams. Sometimes I swear my chair lifts a few inches off the ground.
Old-time banjo playing is also based on repetition at the mechanical level. The most popular right-hand technique, known as clawhammer, is based on a rhythmic pattern that players call the ‘bum-diddy.’ A player strikes a melody note with the nail of their index finger, brushes the strings with all their nails, and plucks the highest string with their thumb. This nail (bum) brush (di-) thumb (-dy) pattern is the fundamental gestural and rhythmic loop of banjo playing. It is repeated four times per measure. When playing a tune, banjo players attack it using this repeated loop, and part of the puzzle (and the fun) of the instrument is figuring how to work within the confines of the bum-diddy in order to hit the right melody notes on the right beat. The gestural repetition of clawhammer is, I think, the reason for the banjo’s addictive properties. Moving with the same motion, with the same rhythm, for 10 minutes, while playing a melody on loop, is meditative, mesmerizing, anesthetizing. It’s why I can’t stop playing.
ture feels pleasurable in the same way any physical habit does. Having picked at my banjo long enough, I’ve started to wear into the synthetic skin that is stretched over its head. Since I tend to gently strike the head when I downpick with the nail of my index finger and when I pluck the drone string with my thumb, there are translucent patches of wear both above and below the strings: a visible mark, on my instrument, of my own hand repeating the same gesture thousands of times.
There is a deep human need to repeat small gestures. My own childhood body-picking habits were an inverted form of the same tendency that turns the grand cosmic wheel of old-time music with our clawhammering and shuffle bowing. Both habits can lull the picker into a state of trance or tranquility, whether by forging a deep sonic groove with a group of players, or by forging a groove in the skin. But skin picking is a solitary, self-soothing action, concerned only with one’s own body and mind; it serves to block the world out, allowing the picker to focus on something they can physically control. Conversely, the anaesthetizing properties of old-time music emerge most easily in a jam setting, when repetition is co-created. Dermatillomania, in other words, is concerned with picking apart, whereas you might call the participatory tradition of old-time music something like ‘picking together.’
Each act is infused with its own set of myths: skin picking might announce an investment in the control of the body, the permeability of skin, the boundary between self and Other, while banjo playing is freighted with narratives about connection, heritage, tradition, even time travel. But while the stakes of skin picking are usually worked out by the picker in private, the stakes of playing an instrument are reiterated and remythologized communally, out loud.
The relationship between our physical connections to the instruments and the less-than-tangible heritage of old-time music is something players talk about all the time. Sandol Astrausky, our oldtime string band teacher here at Brown and a lifelong fiddle player, often explains that when learning a tune from a source recording, she sometimes realizes that the fiddler is playing a lick or phrase with a finger pattern that is totally different from those that her hand naturally follows. In her temporal and spatial distance from the contexts of fiddlers in the recordings, she has learned to play with different melodic preferences. But though her habits of movement across the fiddle’s fingerboard are different from those of her predecessors, she belongs to the same tradition, plays the same music.
Heritage is not something that we wrestle out of the past: It is things we repeat with our bodies. Performance studies scholar Diana Taylor theorizes a repertoire of culture, which “enacts embodied memory” and must be reproduced through the presence of people. The embodied repertoire, says Taylor, “both keeps and transforms choreographies of meaning”— it allows for the physical details of gesture to change, while its meaning remains fixed. Take the first tune I really mastered on the banjo: “Fortune,” which I
ly than Fred Cockerham would have interacted with his fretless, luthier-crafted one; though we hold the instrument at different angles against our bodies and play with different techniques and different levels of expertise; though we fret the notes differently and our banjo heads are worn down in different places, when I play “Fortune,” I hold onto an idea that I’m playing the same thing that he was—or attempting to.
When I pick up my banjo and play a tune, I’m not so much the latest link in an unbroken musical chain, or part of the continuous old-time loop. Rather, old-time lives on every time I try and fail to play just like Fred Cockerham. The archive of old-time tunes is made up primarily of field recordings collected by folklorists. Yet when we privilege the field recording as the ultimate preservative resource, as the most valuable and longevous distillation of musical heritage, we ignore the fundamental fact that oldtime music, like any other form of heritage, lives on in the changing gestures of the body. The embodied repertoire persists in all the practicing you’ve done to internalize old-time rhythms and grooves until they are naturalized in your body, and in the way those grooves are permanently changed as your individual hands move with them. The limits and differences of our bodies create the living tradition.
There’s a romance, though, in imagining that our physical movements can match those of our teachers and predecessors. Banjoist Cameron DeWhitt, on a recent episode of their old-time podcast Get Up in the Cool, shared a new kind of listening that they’ve been attempting with source recordings, a “time traveling, sort of, like, somatic solidarity thing that happens” when they listen to solo banjo recordings. “I’m going to actually try to do the same body motions as these people, and not just listen to the music abstractly, but, like, see it as choreography as well. Like, this is not just sounds, this is a series of body movements, you know?” Without visual evidence, there’s no way for DeWhitt to confirm that their gestures actually match those that a musician was making in a source recording. But for someone with DeWhitt’s depth of familiarity and experience in the tradition, it’s possible for them to come quite close. Performing a gesture that you can assert, with some degree of surety, was performed by your musical ancestor too, is an intimate and fleshy kind of heritage. That relationship is made all the more profound through the deep, expert listening that is required to confidently translate a sound into motion. To parrot back gestures that you can actually see is one thing, but to become the conduit for these movements through your powers of listening is different entirely: It’s “spooky,” says DeWhitt—like “invoking a spirit or being possessed or something.”
Elisabeth Le Guin, a musicologist and classical cellist, calls this kind of embodied relationship to music “carnal.” On the experience of performing a sonata by Boccherini, a long-dead composer who wrote the work to perform himself, Le Guin writes, “I am aware of acting the connection between parts of someone who cannot be here in the flesh. I have become not just his hands, but his binding agent, the continuity, the consciousness.” This is a carnal expe-
rience because it involves accessing a piece of music and connecting to its composer primarily through the body, but it’s also, I would argue, a profoundly spiritual one. To invest in these powers of performance, one must believe in a continuous force that exists outside of the body and is capable of entering it. Le Guin, of course, does not actually have Boccherini’s body, and she will never be able to move in exactly the way Boccherini did, by necessity failing to “become his hands,” no matter how closely she studies his scores. But it is within that point of failure, within the irreparable difference of gesture, that heritage steps in, becoming the ligament that connects the historical and present bodies. For both DeWhitt and Le Guin, this embodied becoming of a musical ancestor is only possible with a deep physical relationship to one’s own instrument and the way it feels to play it, a knowledge developed in the context of the musical practices of today, in the here and now in which we live and our ancestors do not. For our bodies to become binding agents: That is the gift of belonging to a musical tradition.
I’m thinking about how to end this piece and chewing on the inside of my lip. What’s so alluring about skin picking that it can’t be replaced by string picking, after all? Sometimes, even the catharsis of a hypnotic jam session still cannot match the relief that comes from working through something by picking yourself apart. This is a sensation that can be found in music too. Salomé Voegelin describes the experience of listening to harsh noise artist Merzbow as a process of bodily trial and fragmentation. “The sonic fragments and rhythms are trying me and I am trying myself through them […] My listening performs the noise as it enters me and implodes me, scattering my body all over the room: centrifugally into space, propelling ever further outwards, onwards, away from here.” To feel entered and scattered by an external sound is rare and exquisite. To fragment, to scatter, to pick apart, to put the body on trial—these are processes that might feel alien to the extreme coming-together of the old-time jam, but being a banjo player and a student of this musical tradition also calls for a kind of fragmentation. It requires creating an opening in yourself to allow the music of the past in. And as students, we must acknowledge that our task is impossible: We will never be pure and open conduits to the music, just as the skin picker’s wound will always close. So we keep picking ourselves open. I was down on a farm in Virginia for an oldtime music festival this past September. I’d climb out of my tent in the mornings, brush my teeth, and set to jamming for 16 hours or so, as one does at these kinds of gatherings. One night, a stinging in my cuticles snapped me out of my musical trance. I looked down at my hands. I had picked so long that my fingers had started to bleed.
DINA PFEFFER B’26.5 is tipping back the corn.
“LOVE THE FRONT OF ME, HONEY”
HEDWIG IN THE REARVIEW MIRROR
( TEXT CAMERON CALONZO AND MOHAMED JAOUADI DESIGN IRIS SOOHYUN LEE
cheers erupted as early as the opening credits, lingered after most musical numbers, and boomed at a certain mall scene with the location captioned “PROVIDENCE, RI.” The song “Wig in a Box” includes onscreen bouncing-ball lyrics for singing along, although it seemed that the heartily-bellowing audience already knew the words by heart. As the film faded to black, audible sniffles rippled throughout the crowd.
Hedwig and the Angry Inch is an adaptation of the play of the same name, revolving around the titular Hedwig, a genderqueer rock musician who immigrates to the US from communist East Germany; she sings about the fall of the Berlin Wall, man’s primordial two-headed ancestors, the mess of scar tissue between her legs, and her evil ex-boyfriend. The film was brought to campus as part of the Brown Arts Institute’s (get ready) “Trash Camp Super Queer What
religious icon. Mitchell further asserts that, working beyond the bounds of an established target audience or in-group, “the art of storytelling, films, movies, whatever, more than scientists, more than governments, radically changed how people feel about queer people.” There’s a dominating sense of humanity in Hedwig, and engaging with this humanity in the realm of fiction can work to break down real-world prejudice.
There is, however, the question of representation. Is the representation of queerness in art enough? What counts as ‘bad’ representation? For some, Hedwig does: a transfeminine character played by a cisgender man, by today’s standards, is largely unacceptable. It constitutes the deprivation of a role from a potential actor who shares the identity of the character, from a marginalized group notoriously subject to employment discrimination. It also feeds into the notion of
glance as a reference to Hedwig’s transness, this naturally feels prickly. Yet the exact terms of this abnormality are laid out plainly in the song “Angry Inch”:
My sex-change operation got botched
My guardian angel fell asleep on the watch
Now all I got is a Barbie Doll–crotch
I got an angry inch
What is often neglected in criticisms of the film’s depiction of transness is that Hedwig is explicitly not a trans woman—she does not medically transition on her own terms, and the rhetoric of her surgery being “botched” does not align with the conservative view of all gender-affirming care as mutilation. Hedwig is mutilated, against her will; she sings of how her mother and boyfriend “dragged [her] to the doctor” in order
the error in his initial reaction and changes course, professing his love for her over and over, almost weepy. She grips his face and lets out a wounded wail: “Then love the front of me, honey!” He escapes her grasp, and she’s alone again.
Much rhetoric around transition nowadays broadly concedes to the idea that fulfillment comes with harmony between the inside and out. This model posits a tie between physical attributes subject to modification—see Hedwig’s glamorous outfits, wigs, makeup, and yes, her genitals—and an immutable ‘inner self.’ Ostensibly, the self is actualized when these physical attributes finally serve as an adequate expression of one’s self-conception. And in a country where trans healthcare exists so precariously, it’s no wonder that such emphasis is placed on the physical, specifically on the mitigation of dysphoria. However, there’s something radical about Hedwig’s approach to this: Hedwig’s body is very much wrong, out of harmony with her own sense of her gender identity. And yet she is still entirely unabashed, confident— one might even say liberated.
+++
Hedwig’s performance numbers are an exercise in elasticity, sites where boundaries are interrupted and pulled like loose threads until they unravel. The shabby Midwestern dive restaurants where Hedwig performs no longer recognize themselves. Usually steeped in a gloom of soullessness and doomed mundanity, they are radically rearranged the moment Hedwig flaps her wings and flaunts her wigs. They instead become stages of extravagance, revolt and stardom, bending to the will of emotionally damaged punk immigrants.
In “Sugar Daddy,” the fifth song in the film, Hedwig appears in a campy office siren outfit: fishnets over her blonde wig, a glittery grey top, a synthetic black leather skirt, an unsexy patterned tie, and a high-top Converse.
with how certain music genres have been co-opted by whiteness. Alongside country music, he mentions Little Richard’s role in the inception of rock ’n’ roll with “Tutti Frutti” (a song about ass-fucking), stressing how Little Richard’s cultural presence was largely minimized due to systemic racism and the counter-rise of Elvis. He insists that it was the misfits, the outcasts who were behind the most revolutionary artistic movement. Hedwig, then, is in this lineage of misfits who ignite an artistic breakthrough through their genre-defying and experimentation.
Moreover, Hedwig’s performances achieve something difficult within contemporary regimes of self-curation. Hedwig’s aesthetic choices are volatile, chaotic, and excessive in a way that resists consolidation. They are erratic. Their subversive quality is that they ultimately fail to accumulate into a coherent narrative of becoming—Hedwig’s self-fashioning remains fragmented. She does not aim to build a polished arc towards the discovery of her ‘immutable’ self as a rockstar. Contemporary self-making pushes us to seek a unique personal style that supposedly reflects our true self. It has become impossible to escape the tyrannical nature of aesthetic categorization. But Hedwig never settles on a consolidated aesthetic, either musically (as seen with her interpretation of country) or stylistically. In “Wig in a Box,” she’s Farrah Fawcett, the ultimate dream girl, when she puts on a bright blonde feathered wig. Then, she, through an Amy Winehouse–esque wig, morphs into a totally fictitious character, “Miss Beehive 1963.” Hedwig rejects the fiction that identity can ever be stabilized and transparently expressed through a coherent presentation. Her identity is perpetually staged, revised, and undone. For other performances, she upcycles her denim jeans, turning them into jackets, jorts, and cardigans paired up with excessive DIY patchwork. Even the patchwork reveals this multiplicity and incoherence: ACT UP slogans, an anarchist logo written on a quote “Yankee Go Home,” a Bowie reference while also pasting segments of the
American and German flags. This playful costuming reveals a spasm of rebellion against an essentialist sense of self. Hedwig is overdetermined by these symbols and politics that have emerged in the historical conditions she finds herself in: from AIDS activism, anti-immigration, to her conflicted relationship with her German roots. This patchwork also gestures towards the messiness of a globalized selfhood, at the height of the Cold War, in which cultural symbols and political movements collide but remain unresolved and saturated with geopolitical tensions. allows us to reaccess the ethos of punk, as an escape from authoritative ideological pressures, a refusal of coherence and conformity, and a rejection of a unified selfhood, made impossible in the rise of globalization. It is this punkhood, affirms Mitchell, that we have continually strayed from, but provides a way for us to confront the darkness of our present political reality. For Mitchell, “understanding complexity is one of the greatest gifts of queerness.” Queerness allows us to comprehend that coherence should be our last concern, if at all; it provides an avenue for vulnerability and true communal care. For if coherence ceases to be our primary demand, we enable contradictions to blossom and furnish our lives. We may instead strive to collectively imagine and build our futures altogether from a point of multiplicity.
Revisiting John Cameron Mitchell’s early works can stir up intense feelings of FOMO. Hearing Mitchell talk about the experiences of making both Hedwig Shortbus (2006), his second feature film, it seems like the magical moment of communal DIY filmmaking is now bygone. One of our favorite stories Mitchell tells us is about DUMBA, a former anarcho-queer collective living and performance space, where Le Tigre held their debut live show in 2000. This is where Mitchell shot Shortbus and managed to cast one of Le Tigre’s members, JD Samson. This sense of nostalgia, while partly sprung from a romantic idea about this cultural moment, also speaks to the current impossibility of accessing subcultures removed from commodification. Subcultures today, if they exist, feel evanescent, quickly fading before turning into a commodity led not by passion but the market, less interested in people than profit maximization. Have we lost the possibility of organic, genuine community? Mitchell, remaining optimistic, proposes a potential solution: “Guys, you need to have sex now…You need to be penetrated! Safely. And you need to penetrate people safely. We all need to be vers.”
CAMERON CALONZO B’28 and MOHAMED JAOUADI B’28 are inching closer.
MONEY, MONEY, MONEY!
Etymology
Money is a store of value, a medium of exchange, and a unit of account. Much of our money-related vocabulary originates from commodities: Capital comes from the Latin capita, meaning heads of cattle; salary from salarium, or salt-money; and the slang buck from trade of buckskins in the colonial period.
c In the first volume of Capital (1867), his seminal critique of the capitalist mode of production, Karl Marx writes: “Could commodities themselves speak, they would say: Our use-value may be a thing that interests men. It is no part of us as objects […] In the eyes of each other we are nothing but exchange-values.” Imbued with transcendent powers of speech and sight, commodities are no longer lifeless objects. Through “exchange-value,” or an object’s ability to be traded for another, an object transforms into a commodity, which seems to have a mind of its own. Rather than valuing an object for its “use-value,” which stems from an object’s ability to satisfy a desire or need, we value commodities for their exchange-value, a property which now seems baked into the object itself. Much like how Mercantilists of old believed gold held inherent precious value, we do the same with money today. While modern fiat currency attains its value through governmental decree, commodity money possesses value apart from its exchange-value. The use of commodity money reveals how currency masks an object’s use-value, or utility derived from physical, material properties. Marx writes that a commodity satisfies human wants, whether they “spring from the stomach or from fancy.” Thus, a commodity’s use-value can stem from an object’s “material utility”—take barley for instance— or from its “social utility.” This social utility can be cultural, spiritual, or ritual, reflecting a community agreement and belief behind a commodity’s value. This shared belief is reified through exchange and could inflate the material utility of a commodity.
In this graph, I determine the material and social utility for a range of commodity money used in specified time periods and geographic locations, for a commodity’s value is contingent upon its cultural context. We, in a very collective sense, choose what we value.
• Classic Maya Period (600–900 CE): Ancient Mayans made salt by boiling brine in pots over fires in salt kitchens. Produced as homogenous units, these salt cakes were traded as far as 15 miles inland
• Middle Ages (7th–14th Century): In West Africa, salt was sometimes traded weightfor-weight for gold
• Modern Era (up to 20th Century): Used in Ethiopia as amole (carved salt blocks)
- 1770s
1945 - 1948 CE 2004 - PRESENT POST WORLD WAR II FRANCE AND BELGIUM, 1993 SIEGE OF SARAJEVO, 2022 RUSSIAN-OCCUPIED KHERSON CHINA, SIBERIA,
• Since the cigarette ban in 2004, mackerel has been used in U.S. prison exchange economies to buy everything from illicit goods such as stolen food to services including shoeshines and cell cleanings. Although mackerel is a high source of protein, incarcerated people didn’t necessarily prefer to eat the smelly fish. When packets of mackerel expired after three years, they became “money macks,” retaining 75% of the value of “eating macks,” and continued to be used in transactions*
• Cigarettes have continued to be used as currency in war-torn locations experiencing inadequate supply of common goods and monetary collapse*
• Dating back to imperial Russia, the mutual aid practice of pomochi among peasants was not repaid with money, but often through festivities including a feast with vodka
• The “made beaver,” a high-quality beaver pelt, was used by the First Nations to trade with the Canadian Hudson’s Bay Company. In the 18th-century, goods had fixed prices in beaver pelts: 1 gun cost 10 beaver pelts, 5 pounds of sugar cost 1 beaver pelt
• A Spanish official in 1570 set the exchange rate of 200 cacao beans to one Spanish real
• The Aztecs believed cacao seeds were a sacred gift from Quetzalcoatl, the god of wisdom. Cacao seeds were also believed to possess magical powers as an aphrodisiac
Salt
Parmesan
Cattle
Barley
Cacao Beans
Beaver Pelts
Vodka
Mackerel
• Used in West Africa as decoration on clothing and furniture, in games and computations, and for divination*
• In the mid-19th c. in West Africa, a man could be purchased for 4,000 to 40,000 cowries
• As cowries became more common, their value sunk, requiring huge quantities for basic transactions
• In rural Mongolia, women prepare tea for the household before it wakes. Folk knowledge says that tea is the face of a woman: One judges a housewife by the quality of her tea and tea services*
• The first pot of tea, considered the best, is sprinkled in a libation to the earth and poured in an offering to the spirits of deceased family members in the family shrine—a ritual thought to bring lasting health and wealth
• Long before the gold standard (1717–1971), Ancient Egyptians used gold to represent divine, eternal power
• Spices were used to cure disease, summon gods, and chase away demons. Spices are mentioned in three holy books: the Old Testament, the New Testament, and the Quran
In ancient times, salt was crucial to preserve meat and fish
• A wheel of parmesan’s value increases with age, each wheel holds the equivalent of 550 liters of milk. As recent as 2009, The New York Times reported some banks in Italy using parmesan wheels as collateral for farmers’ loans
• First Nations used beaver pelts to make durable, waterproof, and warm clothing. The fur was also in high demand for felt hats in Europe, until they became less fashionable in the mid-19th century
• Since ancient times, people have infused boiled water with wild plants and herbs to avoid waterborne diseases
• Cacao is more prized than crops like maize because cacao trees are susceptible to crop failure, making them harder to produce
• Cacao did not make for good currency. Beans have a shelf life of a year. Drought contributed to limited seed supply
• Plump seeds, which made better beverages, carried more monetary value and were used as currency. Ironically, smaller seeds, which are not as good for drink making and don’t hold much monetary value, are actually used for drink- making
• Tobacco was Virginia’s main cash crop, becoming legal tender in 1642. Loans, taxes, and even passage to the colonies could be paid in tobacco
• Quarried from limestone—a material brought by boat from the islands of Palau, 280 miles away
• Diameter range: few inches to 12 feet. The largest, located on Rumung Island, weighs >8,800 lbs making transportation difficult. Boats could collapse under their weight
• Marriage, inheritance, marking alliances, ransom for lives lost in battle*
• Value is not only determined by size, but also by craftsmanship, rarity, beauty, and history: Stones that were more difficult to transport, including those which caused deaths on the journey, were considered more valuable.
• Because of their immense weight, rai stones are rarely moved, even when they change ownership. The community keeps a collective oral history of who owns which stone. In cases where a stone sinks during transport, it is still considered functional currency because its existence and ownership are acknowledged by the community.
Cowrie Shells
ELLIE WU B’28 chooses love.
Cowrie Shells
Tea Bricks Gold
(
Chac
Mool
TEXT MARIA GOMBERG
DESIGN LEA GYUWON SEO ILLUSTRATION GEORGIA TURMAN )
c The four of them had landed in the afternoon but by the time they left the airport it was already dark. The car they had requested online, weeks in advance, had become unavailable, and after refusing an upgrade to a convertible, they spent the next few hours seeking alternative transportation. Her little brother, who had slept soundly for much of the trip, started cooing, crying, and soon wailing, eyes dry. Her spaghetti-strapped shoulders started to ache from the air-conditioned cool.
After flashing some cards and harsh words, the rental car dealer issued a shuttle voucher and instructed them to wait on the curb outside the airport, next to a cardboard cut out of a palm tree. Six identical silver vans pulled up by the family before their real bus arrived. Each time they made a mad dash with all their things only to return dejected back to the edge of the curb.
Thankfully, they had traveled light. The night before, while she was helping her mom roll up everyone’s clothes into tight little wraps, she had begged to pack her own suitcase, to take responsibility for all the sundresses and bathing suits she had carefully picked out. She lost that battle, only being permitted her school backpack and the crossbody purse she got from her aunt for a holiday her and her family did not celebrate. She stuffed them with only useful items: travel sized lotions, sunglasses, slime—which was confiscated by airport security—and a few big books from her bedside table.
The book selection had caused yet another squabble, and soon thereafter time-out. Apparently it is illegal to carry library books across international borders. The dogs at customs are trained to sniff them out, and then you can be fined up to a million dollars. Cash. But she was halfway through a book from her most beloved franchise, and it just didn’t seem fair that the law only applied to the books from the teen loft and not her mom’s adult Russian novel. She huffed, she puffed, she cursed, and she sat cross-legged facing the wall in the den for as many minutes as she had years to her name.
When they arrived at the lobby, they were welcomed by a man in bermudas, gelled hair, and for some reason, a scarf. He helped her and her mom down from the shuttle using his elbow and forearm, and gave her dad a handshake so rough she was taken aback. After bickering at check-in, they were given some bracelets that were to be their room key and wallet for the duration of their stay. Hers hung loosely, so she slipped it from her wrist and into her hand.
A younger, taller guy grabbed their only suitcase and marched the four of them down an outdoor walkway, towards a set of elevators plastered with vinyl advertisements for a zipline. They rode up, walked across a wobbly glass bridge between buildings, then took a golf cart to another lobby where they were welcomed with drinks and finally taken to their “home for the stay.” Their room was spacious, with an overhead fan that made a crisp chopping sound as it spun. There was a long desk, a TV, and a couch facing a big balcony overlooking a pool which was dimly lit after sundown. There was also a bathroom with a separate shower and bath, an immense luxury; not one, but two mini bars; and a few books tucked under lamps and on high shelves. She was told that in this country, putting her shoes on the couch was an unspeakable taboo.
After a few hours of “down time,” punctuated by her brother screaming for food, they got dressed and headed to dinner. She put her bracelet in her purse, which she slung over her shoulder, adult style. Her mom did her hair up in two skinny braids that fell just below her shoulder blades. Her dad refused to put on real shoes. They started walking towards the buffet, which was in a bungalow that looked to be made out of grass.
They passed the pool they could see from their window. From up close, it smelled faintly of a flowery bleach. At the other side, across the stretch of blue, there was a man carved out of a dark, porous rock. He lay on his back, his head cocked to the side, swiveled 90 degrees. He faced her. She faced him. His arms lay amicably at his stomach and supported a large bowl, hollow and empty. He wore what seemed to be earmuffs or a fuzzy winter hat with flaps at each side of his head.
The man cast a shadow that rippled in the water. He looked scary and awesome, his gaze was luring her in. She wondered how the shadow in the water would
move if she touched it, so she jumped in.
As she swam, she heard a familiar gasp and feeble pleas for her to come back ashore. She made good use of her YMCA swimming lessons, paddling out to his image, and touching the base of the rock. Once she was out, clothes sopping and shoes squishing, her parents decided they’d rather stay in and order room service. She watched some TV and was made to stuff toilet paper into her shoes. Her clothes dripped from the bedpost, and her mother ate alone in a different room.
In the morning we are wiser than in the evening, so the next day everybody was in a far better mood. They went to breakfast, where she was allowed to eat cereal of various colors and flavors, drink juice, and lather Nutella on toast. They spent the rest of the day on the resort’s main beach, a shallow alcove intended for parents and kids. Her brother dug a trench in the sand. When he got hungry, he tried eating a handful big enough that her dad took him over to a lifeguard to ask for advice. Her mom drank a cocktail, ate a fishy appetizer with an edible flower, and napped with a big hat over her sun-spectacled eyes. The girl just lay facedown on her towel wondering how people could find joy in a beach if this day was so boring and sucked so terribly bad.
Last year, when they had driven to a resort rather than flown, her uncle had told her about beach reads, books that were only acceptable to read with your feet in the sand. For the trip she had picked books set in daytime or in water. She read them for hours without looking up. Although they were pleasurable, she decided they would have been just as fun on a couch.
After lunch, she picked at the water’s edge, and filled a red pail with sea moss and glass. She remembered that if you take a seashell home from vacation, organizations in charge of preserving a country’s material patrimony will hunt you down, sue you, and take a quarter of your paycheck for the rest of your life.
On the second day things got quite a lot better. Right after breakfast, and a walk by the ocean, she was allowed to go downstairs and swim in the pool by herself (as long as she changed into her bathing suit first). There she met a girl of the same age and from
the same country as her family had been generations ago. This meant that they could speak the same secret language and had the same favorite song. Just a few minutes into chatting, waist deep in chlorinated water, they realized that their rooms were both in the Grand Seashell hallway of the hotel. This bonded them forever. Her new friend was so sunburnt that her skin was shiny, she had clearly already lost a layer or two; she had short hair, and her bathing suit had ruffles in all the places ruffles could go.
From that day on, each morning, taking turns, they would pound their fists against each other’s doors, asking if the other could come out and play. Together, they ran down the stairs to seize the tropical day. Never had she experienced such freedom. In the city where she had grown up, kids her age were always attended to by au pairs. Even her walk to school, just a few blocks down the street, was always handheld. But here she was, getting cocktails at the tiki bar, going shopping at the indoor mall, and feasting on buffet desserts with nothing but the most barebones adult supervision. As long as they didn’t go into the ocean, they were free to do as they pleased. They carried books under their armpits, chased the lazy iguanas, and poked fun at the other kids their age, still in swimming aids, coddled by parents.
They were apart only at bedtime and during the excursions her family took to some of the local landmarks. To her, it all blended together, except for a few fun facts here and there. According to one tour guide, the ancient society that had lived there, near the beach, invented the zero, a ubiquitous number she had thought to have always been real. They flattened their foreheads, played ball games where the losers were sacrificed, and rebuilt their pyramids every few hundred years.
At one of the sites, there was a sculpture identical to the one at the hotel. Their tour guide, a morose man who wore khakis and glasses, spoke in a monotonous drawl to explain pyramids, cacti, and the local species of frog. He noticed her interest in the figure placed precariously near the cliff edge. He intoned: “The Chac Mool is a sculpture convention common to much of Mesoamerica. It is believed that the basin in the figure’s arms was used as a vessel for human sacrifices, primarily the hearts of young effeminate boys.”
On the bus ride back, her dad, who had read the guidebook cover to cover, argued that nothing that they heard during the excursion was “true or even approximately plausible.” He ranted, and raved, clarifying misconceptions and answering the questions nobody asked. It ticked off her mom, who switched seats after they stopped at a rest stop to pee. Still he continued. The local population hadn’t “died out like the dinosaurs.” The girl, a captive and innocent audience, wondered: if they hadn’t died, where had they disappeared to?
Back at the resort, she and her friend went on an evening stroll to get virgin daiquiris at the bar with colorful lanterns. By then they had determined that a strawberry daiquiri was the best drink one could possibly drink. They were recognized and graciously served by an elegant waiter, who called them mis chicas and offered them extra cherries to top off their drinks. She told her about what she had learned on the field trip. Her friend opined that there was no reason to invoke dinosaurs and that her dad seemed to have too much to say. The girl looked at her
friend blank and angry. Her dad was a genius, and there was no way for this girl from a distant provincial place to really understand.
Then they sat in silence for a long time, dangling their sandaled feet and slurping dutifully at the ice stuck in their daiquiri straws, grasping for words to explain how they felt.
On the walk back to the Grand Seashell they stopped to admire the now familiar pool. Now that the girl knew the man was god-like, that he had been fed human livers and hearts, that he had the power to call rain and ruin vacations, she felt extra smart. Maybe because it was their last night together, or maybe because they had realized that they hadn’t used their freedom enough, they decided to jump into the water, just one last time, just for fun. So they held hands and toppled over, wearing their dresses and sandals and sunhats and glasses and Hello Kitty hair clips and lip gloss and sun cream, and they swam all the way to the man, still joined at the hand.
At the other side they tried to climb onto his igneous figure. They clawed at his head and pulled one another up by the shoulders, clutching each other so tightly that they ended up breaking some skin. They climbed, and when they fell shrieking back into the water, they would start climbing again. Finally, they came face to face with the stone man, whose eyes turned out to be two hollow circles that went somewhere deep into the back of his head. With nothing else to offer, they put themselves in his bowl. To fit, they held each other closely, knees pressed to each other’s hearts. They offered themselves up in sacrifice, asking for sour cream Pringles and rain.
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In the morning, which was lazy and sunny, her family ate sliced fruit and listened to the American news on TV. While her parents were packing—now just folding, not rolling—she heard a loud knock at the door. She swung the door open, yelling her friend’s name, but was met with an adult woman with a small wrinkled face.
She had only met her friend’s mother on a few occasions, mostly from afar. She always found her off-putting. Her voice was nasally and her sentences short. She wore large dangly earrings that made her ears droop nearly all the way down to her shoulders. She seemed to have come on vacation with only her daughter, so when she wasn’t there she was completely alone. When the girls were off playing, chatting or swimming, the mother would just sit on the beach and write texts on her pink leather cased phone.
Now, she looked very frazzled and very awake. Her shorts, tight bermudas, and tank top, had been replaced by a slinky night shirt and jeans. She wore the hotel-issued slippers and had mascara streaks on
her cheeks. Next to her was the Customer Experience manager, looking lost and confused.
Before the girl could even begin to understand what was happening, her parents rushed to the door and told her sharply to go sit on the couch. When she didn’t budge and demanded an explanation, the door was slammed in her face with a thud. A few minutes later, as she was standing indignant, alone, with her arms crossed, her father came back with the hotel manager and asked her when was the last time she had seen her friend.
He explained that she had been missing since sundown. She didn’t come home to sleep in the evening, and her mother had assumed she had stayed in their room. When she didn’t show up for breakfast, the front desk was called.
The girl answered all the questions politely. She offered her help, as seen on TV. Once all of the questions had been answered to the hotel management’s satisfaction, her parents agreed that there wasn’t much more they could do. They kept packing in silence, arranged for a taxi, and put on their airport shoes—they were ready to leave.
Her thoughts were racing the entire ride to the airport. Had this all been her fault? Would the god of the statue take a girl in place of a boy with girl features? Was he mad that they had climbed up using his face? Could it be that pool water was poisonous? Could it be that she would never see her best friend in the whole stupid big world, ever, ever, ever again?
MARIA GOMBERG B’26 is in the bowl.
CECI N’EST PAS
CHINESE
( TEXT ANGELA LIAN DESIGN CHELSEA LIU
ILLUSTRATION ALENA ZHANG )
c “You met me at a very chinese time in my life,” reads the text over a sped-up video of a white man eating bao with chopsticks.
“It has come to my attention that we’re all suddenly Chinese, so make congee with me for the first time.”
“This weeks grocery haul after recently being diagnosed as Chinese” (the haul in question includes Cantonese egg noodles, sushi nori, edamame, and A Taste of Thai fish sauce).
“me this morning bc I just converted to chinese.” A white woman pours and drinks hot water from a kettle, a Chinese song playing in the background.
“I asked for (and got) house slippers for Christmas and I made mantou today. Am I a Chinese baddie yet?”
The last half-year or so has been a very Chinese time in the internet’s life. This trend, variously referred to as “being in a Chinese era,” “Chinamaxxing,” “getting more Chinese,” or “becoming a Chinese baddie,” has spurred the creation of countless posts on TikTok and Instagram featuring young Anglophone netizens adopting certain lifestyle practices in pursuit of ‘becoming’ Chinese. They include drinking hot water, wearing house slippers, eating boiled apples, doing qigong movements, smoking Double Happiness cigarettes, drinking Tsingtao beers, wearing clothes like the Tang Adidas jacket, eating congee, and practicing aspects of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM).
Of course, none of them believe that any of these practices will really make them Chinese. The ironic absurdity of phrases like “becoming Chinese” is part of what has fueled the trend. In recent months, though, the trend has given rise to a notably earnest offshoot, with netizens putting the concept of ‘becoming Chinese’ into practice. An absurdist internet joke taken at least a little bit seriously has slipped into real life. ‘Becoming Chinese’ serves as a shortcut to indicate something beyond appreciation of culture. By consuming cherry-picked fragments of what they see as Chinese, and loudly pronouncing the changes they’ve made to the internet, users superficially and temporarily access Chineseness from a safe distance. This group is not necessarily made up of Chinese people, but rather of people who have claimed Chineseness as their own. If one can’t really become Chinese, perhaps one can at least approximate it.
As this trend has expanded beyond its corner of the internet, it has begun to receive backlash from ethnically Chinese netizens—especially diasporic anglophones—flagging cultural appropriation and Orientalism, or simply expressing their discomfort. Faith Xue, the first-generation Chinese American editor-in-chief of Coveteur, wrote that “there is something strange about watching the culture you grew up with, once mocked, reappear as an aspirational social media trend. [...] What a privilege it is, to be able to try on someone else’s identity for a day without inheriting any of the consequences.” These critics of the trend, who as children faced lunchbox bullies and jokes about their names, now report whiplash from the sudden, shallow turnaround, especially with pandemic-driven Sinophobic violence fresh in the collective memory. At the same time, others view the trend as positive or complimentary because being Chinese is framed as desirable—as the goal toward which followers aspire.
Interestingly, a major driver of the trend in its current form is a Chinese American TikToker, @sherryxiiruii. On December 6, 2025, Sherry uploaded her very first video on the subject, telling the viewer in rapid Mandarin (with English subtitles) that if they’re
“AM I A CHINESE BADDIE YET?”
seeing this video, they are an ABC, or American-born Chinese, just like her.1 The caption adds: “i caught you at a very chinese point in your life.” The video did well, and she’s continued with the bit ever since, shortening “American-born Chinese” to simply “Chinese” and advising her viewers on ways to “be a Chinese baddie.”
Videos like Sherry’s—and videos of users following her advice—have sparked extensive discourse. When user @lingytings criticized the trend for being Orientalist and negating the “Chinese lived experience,” someone else came to its defense, writing: “But you’re not currently a citizen of the PRC [People’s Republic of China] & you didn’t grow into adulthood there, so do you really hold authority on the subject?” (The same comment continues to call the trend both “harmless” and “lightly orientalist.”) Another comment points out that the original poster is from Chicago. But Sherry is not a Chinese citizen, either—she, too, is Chinese American. Which begs the question: Who can grant permission? Is permission necessary? Who gets to be the arbiter of Chineseness? Of culture?
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With this trend, a singular Chineseness—bounded, accessible, and homogenized—is implied and widely accepted to be the truth. It connotes a fixed idea, a state toward which one can progress. In reality, Chineseness resists determination. Rather, it is polysemous, blurry, and elusive: a moving target. What we casually refer to as ‘Chinese’ is really a nebulous culture, or rather, a group of cultures, that has evolved immeasurably over the course of millennia.
The area we now refer to as China has seen numerous fractures, (re)unifications, and changes in leadership—over the last several dynastic periods, the Han, Mongols, and Manchus have ruled. ‘Chinese’ points toward a number of cultures that vary both across and within time periods and ethnic groups, but Sinicization (acculturation specifically toward Han Chinese culture) over millennia has significantly suppressed diversity. Today, there are over 50 ethnic groups in China (including Manchu, Mongol, Uyghur, and Tibetan), though the Han Chinese are the majority by far, making up over 90% of China’s population as the world’s largest ethnic group.
It was only in the early years of the Republic, after the 1911 Revolution, that Chinese nationality (中国人) began to overlap with the term for the ethnic groups identified with China (中华民族)—the boundaries of society, nation, and ethnicity becoming one in a state-led effort to consolidate and define a mainland Chinese national and cultural identity. Chinese culture in post-dynastic China has been carefully and consciously (re)constructed with the goal of coherence, leading to a loss in complexity in how ‘Chineseness’ is perceived. Confucian values were intentionally revived in resistance to Western cultural imperialism and are now broadly considered an essential cornerstone of Chinese culture. The Ministry of Education has led ongoing efforts to popularize putonghua (普通话), or the ‘standard’ Chinese dialect, since 1956. The Chinese state has
1 “You don’t know me, so if this is on your For You page, this is meant for you. 我是个ABC, 所以如果你现在看我的视频的 话，你也就是个ABC。如果你认为我说的是错的话，你就 不知道。你父母从来没有跟你说过。这是他们的秘密。但 是我现在我就跟你说他们的秘密。你是个ABC [pointing at the viewer] 华裔.”
a vested interest in producing a consistent, legible identity for the purpose of cultivating soft power and promoting a uniform vision of Chineseness on the international stage, investing in cultural exports and nationalist education. Our homogenous notions of the ‘ancient Chinese culture’ and ‘Chinese identity’ are, in essence, modern constructions. Where meaning and historical roots may exist in local contexts, discourses that envision a global Chineseness are fabricated and ephemeral.
Today, there are major differences in how various Chinese societies—mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong—perceive Chineseness, to say nothing of regional, local, and familial differences. Much of the diaspora is united by putonghua and shared traditional Confucian values, and propelled by the global expansion of Chinese nationalism. This identity, which crucially ties people together into the shape of communities, is not natural or inherent; it demands constant validation. (This is not to say, of course, that Chinese culture itself is arbitrary, ‘made up,’ unreasoned, or lacking roots entirely. Culture, even when constructed, is not made of free will.) The assertion of a unique global Chineseness is, then, a limiting, even dangerous one.
For much of the internet’s lifespan, China has been the butt of the joke. “Made in China” signified cheaply made products; “bing chilling” mocked ‘funny-sounding’ Mandarin. During the COVID-19 pandemic, “dog-eater” jokes became “bat-eater” accusations. Even before the internet, stereotypes and misinterpretations have abounded, from coolies to perpetual foreigners to dragon ladies. These stereotypes construct Chineseness as Other, justifying the marginalization of Chinese people in the United States. It’s easy to understand why many of Chinese descent—who, unlike followers of the trend, cannot shed their Chineseness at will—have felt jarred as a notable portion of the internet turned 180º to not only embrace but also desire Chineseness.
This shift was not entirely sudden, though. In recent years, many social media users have begun to portray China in a much more idealized light, with posts exhibiting easily romanticized imagery of sleek, futuristic cities like Chongqing and Shanghai. Gua sha, a TCM practice, has been touted in the West for years as a way to drain lymph nodes and ‘lift’ the face, and when TikTok was under threat of a U.S. ban in early 2025, users eagerly ran in droves to Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu, or RedNote. Still, until now, Chinese cultural exports have not become as mainstream as Japan’s or Korea’s—anime and K-pop, for instance, are recognizable cultural mainstays in America. The growth in Chinese soft power has been relatively novel. At the same time, Chinese people and products have been thoroughly integrated into U.S. life in ways that are often taken for granted, like the presence of a Chinatown in every major city, and tens of thousands of Chinese restaurants across the country. Similar to how, historically, Chinese people have been used as both model and scapegoat, today, Chineseness is both familiar and Other, both subversive and nonthreatening. Different enough to be appealing, but not enough to be alienating: the ideal conditions for a trend like this to thrive. Although, significantly, most ‘becoming Chinese’ posts ignore the Chinese Communist Party and the political aspects of Chineseness, the trend still has
much to do with politics. China is portrayed as a major political and security threat to the U.S., and Donald Trump and his administration have relentlessly spouted anti-China and anti-Chinese rhetoric. All the while, global perceptions of the U.S. decline sharply. A dream decays. As Americans, particularly younger generations, become more and more disillusioned with the U.S., they look outward—and backwards to an ‘ancient’ history—in a search for certainty. In a devastating time to be American, ‘becoming Chinese’ is tantalizing. In one meme posted to Instagram, user @fashionruinedmylife uses Google to translate “hello i am fleeing the American century of humiliation. Can you show me where to buy White Monster Energy Drinks?” into Chinese. In her essay “Eating the Other,” the scholar bell hooks writes: “Masses of young people dissatisfied by U.S. imperialism, unemployment, lack of economic opportunity, afflicted by the postmodern malaise of alienation, no sense of grounding, no redemptive identity, can be manipulated by cultural strategies that offer Otherness as appeasement, particularly through commodification. [...] Cultural appropriation of the Other assuages feelings of deprivation and lack that assault the psyches of radical white youth who choose to be disloyal to western civilization.” The valorization of and self-alignment with the perceived culture of the U.S.’s greatest geopolitical rival is indicative not necessarily of alignment with the CCP, but rather of a wish to break with the U.S. and its current administration. In that sense, it’s not unlike the barrage of “I’m moving to Canada” jokes from 2016, when Trump was first elected. Here, through misguided transitive logic, adopting aspects of Chinese culture and loudly claiming Chineseness becomes a sort of symbol of rejection.
Amidst it all, there is a sense of reaching, and of hope. For Chinese New Year on February 17 this year, a number of TikTok users wore red for good luck. The eager celebration of a new year less than 50 days after January 1 suggests the wish for a new start, another chance. Many find the trend to be genuinely beneficial for their well-being. One user commented under a video of Sherry’s, “no because ive only been Chinese for 2 days and im already taking such good care of myself.” Alongside other trends like “going analog,” ritualistic practices like preparing and drinking herbal TCM remedies can be representative of a form of slow living made especially inviting by the frenetic pace of life today. (hooks enunciates this clearly: “contemporary longing for the ‘primitive’ is expressed by the projection onto the Other of a sense of plenty, bounty, a field of dreams.”) And whilst there is increasing divisiveness and rhetoric about who does or does not belong in the U.S., netizens may be drawn to an imagined community of their own creation. Fueled by desire, followers of the trend use ethnicity (Chineseness) as a marker of culture (Chineseness) as a marker of identity (Chineseness), then invoke that shared identity to engender a sense of community within currently-accepted frameworks of meaning. The goal is belonging—not necessarily amongst Chinese people as a Chinese person, but amongst others who are also ‘becoming’ Chinese.
Herein lies the difference between consuming media about Chinese culture (or indeed, any Othered culture) and trying to ‘embody’ Chineseness. For the latter, the goal is to be subsumed into the culture rather than interact with it (or its people) from the outside. The trend attempts this largely through consumption: what Chinese people are assumed to eat and drink, how they may care for their bodies, what they may buy. This consumption is framed not as the adoption of practices but rather as the acquisition of identity. It is imagined to transmit a fictive Chinese essence, allowing one to briefly inhabit an otherwise inaccessible identity. To consume is to absorb is to ‘become,’ a process hooks terms consumer cannibalism. The Chinese people behind these practices are largely beside the point. Per hooks: “… contemporary notions of ‘crossover’ expand the parameters of cultural production to enable the voice of the non-white Other to be heard by a larger audience even as it denies the specificity of that voice, or as it recoups it for its own use.”
The idea that one can ‘become’ more Chinese by taking concrete everyday actions, that this label can be bestowed upon oneself if the right steps are taken, is necessarily flattening. Through this trend, Chineseness has been reduced to iconography: a series of recognizable practices and products accessible enough to be adopted by non-Chinese netizens
in the West yet distinct enough to be Other. Followers further mysticize the culture for its famously long history, ‘slow living’ habits, and novel (to them) wellness practices, and in doing so, ignore all of the context and history itself. In this process, culture is commodified. What is perceived as Chinese culture is reified and oversimplified such that it is easily digested by a Western, non-Chinese audience. In this process, culture is reduced to products and habits, alienating it from its context and history. Decontextualized fragments of a Western distortion of Chineseness are then neatly swallowed in pursuit of a mystic richness or intensity of life—and eventually, they will be discarded. This fetishization of the commodified culture obscures the multiplicity and impossibility of the sought-after Chineseness.
This particular phenomenon relies entirely on the internet. First, the internet is vital to its transmission; there is no other medium that can propagate content and connection with the same speed and reach (Australian and American news outlets alike have reported on ‘becoming Chinese’). Second, online platforms compound the flattening aspects of cultural commodification. In fact, the internet encourages said flattening and decontextualization— after all, short-form videos are best when snappy and digestible. Third, the internet accelerates globalization, which has allowed unprecedented access to ostensibly distant societies and cultures, and along with it, the ability to adopt and reproduce that culture in a seeming vacuum. For cultural theorist Allen Chun, “globalization has brought about radical changes in how we perceive boundaries of community and place in ways that have profoundly affected the politics and semiotics of self.” Today, new forms of imagined communities have arisen through digital media. Individuals in online communities feel a sense of horizontal connectedness despite their physical distance and manifold other differences. Within this particular trend, though, users are united only in their participation, in their self-fashioning as Chinese. A sense of collective belonging arises from a ‘possession’ of identity that must be pronounced in order to be true. Drinking hot water is just drinking hot water. Capturing the action on camera, posting it on TikTok, and adding a caption relating to the trend is what makes it ‘Chinese.’ That, in turn, makes the creator a part of something.
But attempts to claim cultural identity and belonging by assuming an aggregation of traits are doomed to fail. The trend aims to extract the essence of an already-nebulous identity then use that as the foundation of digital social connection. Even with blurred boundaries, perhaps an imagined community built atop an imagined community cannot be considered a community at all.
“My morning routine since becoming Chinese.” A woman walks to her kitchen, camera pointed down at her house slippers, then boils apples with star anise and cinnamon sticks and films herself drinking the concoction out of a mug. “Honor to Us All” plays in the background. A top comment reads, “Notice how the Asian community aren’t offended by this and love that we’re actually embracing their culture,
not misappropriating it.” Ignoring the uncontested conflation of Asian and Chinese (plus the fact that many are, in fact, offended), this is true in part: Followers of the trend are certainly “embracing” what they perceive as Chinese culture. However, crucially, ‘appreciation’ and ‘appropriation’ are not mutually exclusive. Superficial attribution to Chinese culture and the expression of desire does not erase or condone appropriation. This emulatory cannibalization, done innocently enough on an individual basis, reveals an imperialist entitlement to the culture of the Other. But beyond that, this ‘culture’ was never an unmediated thing to begin with. The ‘Chinese’ being consumed was always already a construction, the ‘reality’ it obscures always already permeable. And yet it is still lived. It accumulates weight. Chineseness may be a construction, but it is one that has been imposed, negotiated, defended, and inherited under pressurized, often hostile conditions. To claim it freely, as a choice, is to relate to it in an entirely different register. The harm is not inherently in the theft, but rather in the asymmetry it creates.
No one can be the arbiter of an impossible culture. No one can hold the keys to something so multiple and vast. But that doesn’t mean just anyone can waltz in, either. ‘Becoming Chinese’ does not—can not— bring one closer in proximity to ‘Chineseness.’ It only further reduces and aestheticizes an already bastardized simulacrum of Chineseness in an effort to solidify an abstract, evolving thing. The trend reveals the same collective fiction-making that underlies any claim to a coherent cultural identity. The difference is only who bears the cost.
Read the full version online at www.theindy.org.
ANGELA LIAN B’26 ‘is’ ‘Chinese.’
THANK YOU, HONORABLE SPEAKER, FOR YOUR RECOGNITION
CLASH AND CLASS IN HIGH SCHOOL DEBATE
Public Forum debate in high school, my girl friend frequently complained that debate was my real partner. She was joking, but I was away on Valentine’s Day in senior year yelling about climate policy. I’m not the only one to dedicate my life, for a time, to debate; every week, high schoolers across America gather to spend their Saturday hunched over laptops, yelling and interrupting, espousing beliefs entirely foreign to them, all for plastic trophies in the shape of podiums. The high school debaters of Rhode Island are no different—passionate, politically engaged young people who love the tedium of research and the thrill of extemporaneous speaking.
The passion of its participants is where similarities between Rhode Island’s debate culture and the rest of the country’s end. Perhaps because of the state’s petiteness or potential for travel-ban–imposing blizzards, Rhode Island debate has cordoned itself off from the rest of the country. While most of the lower 48 contain some debate programs that compete nationally and others that compete locally, nearly all of Rhode Island’s debate programs debate exclusively locally, in the Rhode Island Forensics League (RIFL). The split between local and national programs seen in other states is, functionally, a class divide created by differences in school budgets and parental contributions. Private schools, charter schools, and well-to-do public schools have the resources to hire coaches, fly kids to travel tournaments, and pay for various debate accoutrements (for example, computer stands or AI research agents). Consequently, these wealthier schools self-separate from their local circuits, focusing on the national circuit. As such, public schools and less wealthy Catholic schools are left to clash amongst themselves in less prestigious local leagues.
Rhode Island has no such split between its debate programs. Due to RIFL’s complete monopoly on Rhode Island debate, all teams in the state compete exclusively at local tournaments. RIFL tournaments are attended by debaters of all backgrounds, including programs like Ponaganset High School, a public school in rural RI; Classical High School, a magnet school
in Providence; and Portsmouth Abbey, a private Catholic boarding school. On the one hand, the unified nature of the Rhode Island debate circuit can exacerbate the harms of resource disparities. On the other, it brings together young people from different socioeconomic backgrounds with the express purpose of discussing and processing politics. As a result, RIFL is a unique political gathering space where students learn not only from the earnest policy discussions that constitute each round, but also from crossing class divides to hear new perspectives and confront their material conditions.
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“Thank you, honorable speaker, for your recognition,” Sabrina Hernandez, the debate captain at Classical High School, says before plunging into each of her speeches at RIFL tournaments. RIFL debates are conducted in American Parliamentary. Students compete in pairs, and each round are assigned to either the role of the government or the opposition, determining which side of the resolution (that round’s topic) they must advocate for. After the resolution is announced, each team gets five minutes to prepare their arguments before the debate properly commences. In the course of each round, both teams give three speeches of varying lengths, totalling to 20 minutes of speaking for each side. The round is facilitated by a judge, who acts as a faux-parliamentarian, introducing each speech and, at the round’s conclusion, rendering a ballot in favor of the government or the opposition.
One of Parliamentary debate’s peculiarities is that it allows the government team to pick the resolution for each round. Besides constraints preventing them from picking a truism, such as “The sky is blue,” or “Racism is bad,” as their advocacy, students have ample room for self-expression. For example, Hernandez and her partner have proposed resolutions as serious as “The voting age should be lowered to 16,” or as silly as “Santa Claus and Mrs. Claus should get a divorce.” Thanks to this model, every round revolves around a topic at least half the participants find engaging. Additionally, it allows students to spread awareness of topics they care about, and learn about issues that are important to their peers. Hernandez told The College Hill Independent over text, “Debate has helped me understand a wide range of perspectives,” adding that it “encourages meaningful conversations among young people about important topics like the education system and gender inequality.”
The education provided by debate isn’t limited to knowledge on the topic of each round. It has tangible impacts on students’ other educational endeavors. Roger Nix, the Director of AfterSchool Debate for the Boston Debate League, told the Indy, “There have been many research studies […] which show that literacy rates, attendance rates, graduation rates all improve for students who are doing debate.” Additionally, it builds broader, more portable skills like research
( TEXT RAY EGGERTS
DESIGN CALEB WU & SEBASTIAN BOTERO
ILLUSTRATION SELIM KUTLU )
and public speaking. Hernandez testified to these benefits, saying, “Debate has given me the ability to speak my mind, on and off the podium.” As captain, she aims to bring out that same confidence in her teammates.
However, not everyone can equally enjoy the benefits of RIFL. Public schools can have their competitive success hindered by a lack of coaching beyond what teacher advisors can provide. While teachers work hard to support their teams, coaching isn’t necessarily their primary focus. Hernandez told the Indy that, as a public school student, she often feels her team is ill-prepared for tournaments, as they’ve had less time to fine-tune their cases and fewer opportunities to hone their public speaking outside debate. These structural inequities can impact teams’ competitive success. Although wins aren’t everything, they serve as encouragement to stick with debate—it’s hard to keep students involved if they mostly lose. Additionally, debate accolades make positive contributions to college applications, meaning competitive imbalances can impact long-term educational opportunities and outcomes.
Issues with RIFL’s accessibility affect more than just the results of rounds. Between travel, food, and tournament fees, many schools can’t participate in the league at all. Of Providence’s nine public schools, Classical is currently the only one with a debate program. Although Central and Providence Career and Technical Academy are “right next to Classical,” Hernandez said, “they don’t compete. If they did, it might be more fair.”
RIFL, for all its pros and cons, has not always been the only option. Until 2023, select Rhode Island high schools participated in the Rhode Island Urban Debate League (RIUDL). Kurt Ostrow, a Brown alumnus and former RIUDL administrator, spoke to the Indy on his experience with the program. RIUDL was run in collaboration with Brown’s Swearer Center for Public Service and the National Association for Urban Debate Leagues, a nonprofit organization that brings policy debate to underserved areas. “It started as a reaction to the white and wealthy, very expensive policy debate circuit,” Ostrow said. “UDLs sprung up to make debate more accessible.” Due to fundraising and a partnership with Brown, the now-defunct program charged members very little and provided each affiliated school with a Brown undergrad as a volunteer coach. These allowances helped schools participate that otherwise couldn’t have—six of Providence’s nine public schools were RIUDL members.
The exact cause of RIUDL’s 2023 collapse is hard to trace. The Facebook post announcing its closure cited “funding shortfalls,” “staff transitions,” and post-pandemic struggles “to regain our famously high community engagement.” Nix suggested to the Indy that a decline in Brown’s involvement contributed to its closure, as the student organization that volunteered to coach
RIUDL schools saw decreases in membership during the pandemic. The Indy reached out to the Swearer Center for comment on its relationship with RIUDL, but got no response. No matter the cause, RIUDL’s closure had devastating effects on debate’s accessibility in the state: of RIUDL’s participating schools, Classical alone joined RIFL. Additionally, the Boston Debate League (BDL), another urban league, offered to accept Rhode Island’s displaced programs into their competitions. Only one school accepted the offer.
Despite its flaws, even in part because of them, debate is a uniquely powerful tool for getting students to think about the societal issues they see, and search for potential remedies.
Phillipe Simonini is the coach of Woonsocket High School’s policy debate team. When RIUDL closed in 2023, Simonini faced a difficult decision: end the school’s program, join RIFL, or join the Boston Debate League (BDL). He chose the BDL, where his team now competes in their monthly tournaments. Simonini told the Indy that a primary factor in this decision was his fear that unlike in urban leagues, RIFL debaters would be “judged by how they present, rather than what they express.” Compared to RIUDL’s Providence members, the Woonsocket program was uniquely well-equipped to switch: the team regularly ventured into Providence for RIUDL, so they already had the infrastructure to travel for tournaments. The BDL’s $30-per-student entry fee was an additional barrier, and Woonsocket was the only team that could afford it. Between travel and the cost, the switch was too much for the rest of RIUDL’s participants to make. +++
Despite the public’s image of a ‘debater’— tainted by right wing political pundits who adopt the language of debate to further their agendas— high school debate competitions are some of the most progressive political spaces for young people. However, differences in available judg-
local circuits, like RIFL, and the national circuit. Judging is a huge determining factor for the political culture of a debate circuit, because all discourse in a round is framed by the types of arguments a judge will tolerate and vote for.
This divide between local circuits and the national circuit mirrors the one between mainstream liberalism and the leftist academy. Local rounds tend to fall within the lines of modern liberal politics: Debaters espouse the benefits of free trade, fret about China winning the tech race, and deride Trump’s erosion of federalism to appeal to well-educated, Gen-X parent judges. On the other hand, the national circuit’s judges are frequently coaches or former debaters, who are younger and more willing to vote on radical arguments. As such, national circuit debate drapes itself in the language of postmodernism and leftist literature; you’ll rarely meet a group of high schoolers more committed to Afropessimism, escaping the simulacrum, or building a Maoist vanguard party than the debaters at the national circuit’s Tournament of Champions. Consequently, the political education provided by debate is unevenly distributed. Students from disadvantaged backgrounds, who may identify with critical literature the most, are the least likely to get a chance to discuss these ideas in debate.
In RIFL, judging can also be an equity issue. While Classical can provide some judges, their contributions are dwarfed by those of suburban schools, like Cumberland or Barrington, with larger teams and more parents to spare. Sometimes, parent judges from these larger programs make up such a disproportionate part of the judging pool that they end up judging rounds between students from their child’s school and students from other schools. This introduces bias into the round, if not a clear conflict of interest.
The skewed demographics of RIFL’s judging can introduce other harmful biases into the activity. According to Hernandez, a significant number of her rounds are judged by “white, suburban parents, who are kind, but […] lack perspective.” As a Venezuelan immigrant, she remembers times that judges reduced her speaker scores, a metric of each debater’s contribution to the round, due to her accent. She also noticed differences in how she and her white, male debate partner are treated by opponents and judges alike. Debate’s reliance on the subjective opinions of volunteer judges invites these implicit biases, discouraging participation of
minority students. For Hernandez, each round demands she confront the discrimination in the room and teaches a cruel lesson on how “presentation and identity affect the world’s perception of me.”
For those who keep with it in spite of these issues, debate in Rhode Island serves the unintended function of forcing students to reckon with the ways their material conditions immediately impact their social position. Naturally, it would be preferable for students to never encounter structural disadvantages in the first place. However, encounters in the debate space with these deep-seated societal harms provide unique opportunities to begin addressing them. These are spaces where students are already encouraged to reflect critically on social structures, societal problems, and generate potential solutions. As such, privileged students may find it easier to recognize and diminish the harms perpetuated in debate. Similarly, the debaters harmed by these issues may be able to more plainly identify the problems facing them as a result of their material conditions, find resilience tactics, and build class consciousness.
Debate, as a political education project, attempts to simulate American politics. It shouldn’t be surprising that, in the process, it replicates many of our political system’s flaws. Rhode Island’s circuit uniquely amplifies these problems, with its insular tendencies and fresh memories of a failed, more idealistic system. However, my interactions with students and coaches in the debate space—in the writing of this piece and my own time in debate—leave me hopeful. Despite its flaws, even in part because of them, debate is a uniquely powerful tool for getting students to think about the societal issues they see, and search for potential remedies. Debate may be no better than society at avoiding structural problems, but I feel hopeful that it’s better at generating solutions.
RAY EGGERTS B’29 is conceding the nonunique to kick out of the turn.
SADISTIC NOOBS
ROBLOX IS A TODDLER/TWEEN/PREDATOR’S VIRTUAL WORLD
( TEXT MAHLIAT TAMRAT DESIGN ROSE HOLDBROOK ILLUSTRATION ELLA XU )
Content warning: grooming, sexual harm to children, self-harm
c My Roblox account got banned during my senior year of high school for child pornography.
I uploaded an image of Harmonia Rosales’ The Creation of Adam (2017), an Afro-Latina rendition of Michelangelo’s nude painting of the same name, while digitally curating an exhibition in Roblox Studio for my AP Art History final. Afterwards, a message appeared on my screen: “mauy123 is banned.” Silly mistake on my part.
I mourned my account and created a new one a day later, but grief still washes over me periodically. The account didn’t have any Robux (the currency of the Robloxian world, where $1 equates to 80–100 Robux) to purchase cooler outfits or power-ups. Regardless, my wealth materialized through my 200 friends on the platform, many of whom I connected with in early middle and elementary school, playing obbies (short for “obstacle course”) and sharing secrets in the chat. I wonder where crystalshine9999 is now. She knows all about my fifth-grade crush.
By seventh grade, I myself stopped playing in the virtual universe, but I still joined the platform alongside friends on random occasions, hoping to relive the nostalgia of my tweenage years. The night of my 20th birthday ended with a round of Find the Labubu on Roblox. Three days later, a YouTube advertisement for a class-action lawsuit against Roblox directed me to a phone number where I could submit a testimony of child harassment. Clicking the link darkened my fond memories of the game with faint recollections of strange people who asked crystalshine9999 and me off-putting questions during our online escapades.
Roblox has been banned in nine countries. Now in the U.S., the Roblox Corporation is undergoing a multidistrict lawsuit with over 100 cases of child abuse and assault.
In May 2025, families in Florida and Alabama sued Roblox for enabling sexual exploitation. The lawsuit expanded nationally when victims in North Carolina, California, and Michigan similarly accused the platform of making it easier for predators to access and abuse its young users through deceptive marketing and negligent design. The number of lawsuits in the case grows each day, with more families coming forward to share their stories of child harm. Victimization in each case follows a calculated pattern of predators initiating contact with children through Roblox’s online chat feature, establishing trust (sometimes via Robux), and later coercing the child into extending sexually explicit conversations onto less monitored platforms such as Discord or Snapchat. In other words, Roblox is both an open field for predators and a launch pad for continued abuse. Parents accused Roblox of failing to provide adequate warnings about the risks of sexual exploitation.
In the absence of regulation, broad networks of child exploitation are given free rein on the platform. 764 is a dark web child exploitation network formed under “The Com,” a broader alliance of communities that digitally coerce children into committing sexual and otherwise violent acts. Utilizing Roblox, members of 764 recruit and manipulate minors into performing self-harm and sending sexually explicit material.
A drastic increase in 764 activities in 2025 (more than 2,000 cases were reported in the first nine months of last year) raises alarming concerns about the robustness of their network and how Roblox’s anonymity facilitates such growth. The FBI issued a PSA about 764 on March 6, 2025, warning guardians to monitor their children’s online activities and to report any unusual behavioral changes. Defined as a “militant accelerationist terrorist group” by the Global Network on Extremism and Technology (GNET), 764’s sextortion is part of a broader plan to
subvert the current social order through violence. GNET reports that the group’s worldviews draw from fascism, Social Darwinism, and Satanism. As participants in the Robloxian world, predator networks are enabled to manipulate children by capitalizing on the established virtual social order that parents cannot access. Roblox is valued at $54 billion, with more than enough resources to incorpo rate child-friendly safety measures into its interface, yet the corporation prioritizes growth over user safety.
A growing cultural friction is emerging amid Roblox’s global controversies—the difference in the digital worlding of Gen Alpha/Gen Z and that of their parents. For older generations, technol ogy is used to extend physical connection into the digital and vice versa. To illustrate, adults commonly follow someone on Instagram to stay in contact after physically meeting, or connect with someone on LinkedIn to invite them to a coffee chat. Within the Gen Alpha/Z worlds of Discord, Roblox, and other such platforms, socialization often begins and ends online—a digital relationship in which the virtual is the social world but still has tangible implications. Unaware of how to navigate this digital diffusion of location and how virtual violence manifests psychologically and physically, adults routinely misconceive the material effects of the digital worlds their children log onto, therefore hindering parental protection.
banned by the Russian government.
Although children engage in virtual social worlds, social media within gaming systems still mirrors the adult social order. This January, children on a private server on the Roblox game Brookhaven reenacted immigration raids and staged ICE protests—characters donned ICE gear while others carried signs reading “F ICE” and “VIVA MEXICO.” In a recent viral TikTok, a femme-looking Roblox avatar attends an NBA YoungBoy concert and twerks on a character in skinny jeans and a hoodie—a gendered, hyper-sexualized, and racially charged interpretation of adult engagement with rap culture. In such examples, Roblox reflects children’s unfiltered understanding of the adult world, illuminating a connection between the differing universes.
Although the dynamics of Roblox reflect the tangible social world, they are often unrecognizable to parents, as strangers to this digital universe who lack knowledge of Robloxian social procedures. To demonstrate: if a child told their guardian, “a player gave me Robux so I wouldn’t be a noob anymore,” the guardian would not be able to analogize this as the child taking candy from a stranger. This gap can have devastating repercussions. In an interview with the father of a child from Washington who ended his life after months of manipulation by a 764 member, he expresses concern towards the psychological control perpetrators exert over youth on the platform—what he calls “access directly to our kids’ minds.” Such examples horrifically expose how predators utilize the youth-dominated digital world to coerce children into physical harm by capitalizing on chasms between the digital knowledge of Gen Alpha/Z children and their guardians.
Amidst global safety fears regarding Roblox usership empowering predators’ access to children without parental supervision, nine countries— Algeria, China, Egypt, Iraq, North Korea, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, and Russia—banned the game entirely. Concerns varied from predatory behavior to the ‘maintenance of social order.’ Here, the guise of protective measures becomes exploited to normalize state control.
On December 3, 2025, the Roskomnadzor (the Russian Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology, and Mass Media) banned Roblox. Under a regime that uses censorship to suppress dissent, Roblox is not the first online platform to face restrictions in Russia; alongside WhatsApp, Instagram, Telegram, and Facebook, the game joined a larger group of interfaces
Frustrated by the ban, civilians in Russia took to the streets, holding signs reading “hands off Roblox” in Vladimir Vysotsky Park in Tomsk. The small group made national headlines for their protest, sparking debate over censorship—particularly considering how the justification for the ban focused on preventing the spread of “LGBT propaganda” and predatory behavior from the platform. The Russian government received over 63,000 complaint letters from children, threatening to leave the country after the banning of their virtual world. The state advertises its oppressive agenda as a paternalistic measure, leveraging fears of child vulnerability online to maintain social and, therefore, political control of digital worlding.
Roblox’s time under fire will undoubtedly set a precedent for digital child safety laws; under increasing pressure, the corporation recently implemented an age verification system involving facial scans that purport to deduce user age. Groups such as 764 capitalize on virtual worlding to coerce youth, facilitating parental panic and providing opportunity for authoritarian governments to assert control over digital worlds while large gaming corporations grow and profit from this interface of child socialization.
Despite the horrors that Roblox facilitates, children’s creative attraction to the platform illuminates the possibilities for digital worldbuilding. Social media itself is not inherently predatory and sustains radical possibilities for youth populations; in the recent Nepali Revolution, Gen Z Nepalis used Discord to select an interim prime minister in days. The emancipatory possibilities of digital worlding are thwarted by private greed, underscoring demands for increased online safety and educational resources for guardians. +++
My account, mauy123, is still banned.
I blame my instinctive upload of a painting with nude breasts to Roblox Studio on my desensitization to the predatory and sexual exposure many young Robloxians experience. Assuming few restrictions, I clicked without thinking twice.
Any potential of reviving my friendship with crystalshine9999 died that day—our friendship began and ended online, just like many other young people engaged in virtual worlds. I wonder if she looked like her avatar: a Black girl with straight hair, a purple tank top, and jeans.
Maybe I’ll play a brainrot obby at the club when I turn 21 this year.
MAHLIAT TAMRAT B’27 is feeling like an oof today.
Indie Dressing Room
cMarch approaches. Soon, everyone’s true Style will emerge from under the cocoon of big big winter coats. For some, this is a thrilling prospect. For others, though, it may be vom-inducing. After all, in a place like Providence, Rhode Island (known to many as the fashion capital of New England), a person’s outfit is the first thing we notice about them. Here, we’re so chic we just call Fashion Week “week.” It can be intimidating to get dressed in the morning when every day is, in fact, a fashion show. They don’t warn you about that. But never fear: Indie is here.
Dear Indie, It feels like everyone here is better dressed than me. How do I fix that?
Sincerely, Flopchopica
When I stared at this question, it stared back down at me all intimidating and mean. A question of this size and stature calls for several angles of attack. So I’ve tapped some of my most fashionable friends for advice:
SY: The less vain side of me wants to say that there’s no such thing as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ style and that the key to dressing well is simply wearing clothes that call to your heart. The other, more cynical side of me wants to tell you that good style, in the mainstream sense, opens doors in real, tangible ways. But there are ways to build a unique style that still feels like you. Find a style icon, a color palette you like, shapes that work well on your body, and hit the thrift store or your most stylish friend’s closet or eBay, buying the simple things you think you’ll wear at least two years down the line. Mostly though I think it’s not that deep.
DI: Wear a really big hat every day until it becomes your signature. Think Melania, or Zendaya that one time. It will absorb all the attention like a sponge, and no one will notice what you’re wearing otherwise.
KA: NO MORE POLYESTER!!
CH: Find a style icon. Rob them.
NS: Stop trying to dress like other people and start trying to dress like yourself. And ignore anything that influencers try to advertise as “chic.”
PC: You are thinking about yourself too much.
AL: Consider that maybe you are just in the wrong room. Instead of changing how you dress, simply find somewhere where you are better dressed than every one else. There has to be somewhere.
Ultimately, I think comparison defeats the spirit of personal style. Dressing ‘better’ kind of means nothing at all. Try clothes on, figure out what calls to you, and stay practical. If you are not the type of person to wear five necklaces and a dress over jeans with a scarf as a belt, don’t do that. It’s ok. Being a shirtpants is ok. Some of the most stylish people I know spam the same, like, 4 tops and 3 pants that just look really good on them. You can do it too! Wear clothes, I mean. You’ve been doing it for years. So put on your big girl pants and go forth, beautiful.
( TEXT ANGELA LIAN DESIGN KAYLA RANDOLPH )
Dear Indie, I’m getting coffee with my ex this weekend and I don’t know what to wear. HELP!!! Sincerely, Seeking Clothesure
Once upon a time, I was asked “If you were seein an ex would u try to come off as more chill or put together?” I did not know how to answer, partly because “chill” and “put together” don’t seem to be mutually exclusive. Also because that was a stupid question to ask. But after three years of growth and reflection, I can safely conclude that you should not try to impart a “chill” vibe, if only because that is not true to who you are. If you’re asking, you are certainly not even a little bit “chill.” And “chill” is overrated anyways. You should try to look really DOMINANT. The vibe you should give off is Big and Enormous, like it doesn’t even matter that your ex moved on, and you don’t even care that they changed their coffee order and didn’t even tell you, and no, you weren’t listen ing to Katy Perry’s “The One That Got Away” on repeat for weeks after the breakup. That would simply never happen. Because you are too big, spiritually. Here’s how to do that:
• Sunglasses. Don’t take them off the whole time
• The tallest shoes you own (bonus points if they click clack)
A watch to glance at
Something with really outsized pockets that you can fit anything in, such as a grapefruit or a copy of the Bible
• A turtleneck that says you have been doing a lot of thinking since the breakup
An engagement ring
• Outerwear that requires two hands to take off. Even better: a lot of layers of outerwear that you have to slowly take off one by one before sitting down, forcing them to wait awkwardly in silence
Also, be sure to walk in 7–9 minutes late. And order an Americano, hot. Bon app!
P.S. Some other locations where it may benefit you to look DOMINANT (in which case you can follow any of the above outfit advice):
• Kennedy Plaza
• Indy Crit
• The Underground Ego 18+ Thursday nights
In Memory of Annie Song
[From Annie’s GoFundMe: We are saddened to write that Annie Song passed away at Brown University on February 17, 2026. This is an extremely painful and difficult time for Annie’s family, friends, and the many people who had the privilege of knowing her in Providence, Seattle, and beyond. Annie was the most beautiful and bright presence in the lives of everyone she met. She was a kind, thoughtful friend who always put others before herself and made us laugh like no one else we knew. Her close friends from college and high school have created this fund to support her funeral and transportation costs back to Seattle, WA, where she called home. All of the raised funds will be transferred to her family to support them through this difficult time.]
9 Launched to drive away evil 10 Practice of voluntarily abstinence from some or all food and drinks for a set period
02/27/2026
The BuLletin
Events
Support a Haitian Family Facing ICE Detention & Eviction
GoFundMe: The Alliance to Mobilize Our Resistance (AMOR) is fundraising for M, whose son has been detained by ICE since 2023 and is currently detained at the Wyatt Detention Facility in Central Falls, RI. We are seeking to raise $10,000 for M so that she can continue to support her family of four, to help cover the cost of housing, utilities, food, and legal costs for her son while he is detained by ICE at the Wyatt.]
[From the AMOR
14 Symbolizing abundance, wealth, and surplus 15 Arabic phrase commonly used as a greeting during Ramadan 17 Festive food
Khamenei regime catches fire as Iranian protesters hold the torch against government pushback
The nationwide protests in Iran that started in late December 2025 have become the largest and most violent uprising since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, driven by public anger at the nation’s economic collapse and decades of authoritarian rule. According to multiple independent estimates, the death toll is extremely high but this is contested: Iranian government authorities claim around 3,000 deaths, while independent research, hospital statistics, and human rights groups report figures ranging from around 6,000 to more than 30,000, with some hospital data indicating more than 30,000 deaths in just two days in early January and additional mass casualties elsewhere, making this crackdown the deadliest in modern Iranian history. Arrests currently exceed tens of thousands, but an extended nationwide telecommunications blackout has made independent verification difficult. Massacres such as those in Rasht and Fardis, where security forces opened fire on demonstrators, have been documented by both protesters and bystanders, revealing the severity of the Khamenei regime’s response. Online forums and social media have offered a platform for firsthand accounts from people in Iran and from the diaspora, revealing both the emotional toll and real-world dynamics of the protests. Individuals have shared reports of higher amounts of deaths and arrests in smaller towns, while additional protest footage from Tehran and personal anecdotes of families mourning loved ones have illustrated the human cost beyond the numbers. Some have offered opinions about the United States’ role, with many frustrated over perceived Western inaction and others praising the smuggling of Starlink terminals by the U.S. to keep information flowing despite internet blackouts. U.S. policymakers, including the Trump administration, have publicly put pressure on Tehran through sanctions, naval deployments in the region, and diplomatic negotiations related to the Iranian nuclear weapons program. These threats of intervention hover above Iran, yet remain unexecuted. These various narratives show a frantic environment where internal dissent, U.S. intervention, and individual voices intersect amidst one of Iran’s most turbulent eras in decades.
ACROSS
2 The first meal eaten before sunrise during Ramadan 5 Floating decorations 7 Crescent moon 11 People wear this colored clothing to start the year with a “new” look.
12 Having the resources, freedom, and mindset to live a life of hope, meaning, and abundance, rather than just material riches
13 Catalyst for personal transformation, strengthening both one's relationship with God and their character
16 Envelope with money 18 Discipline, “boot camp” to purify the soul
19 What not to do on the First day DOWN 1 The meal eaten after sunset during Ramadan 2 Popular Ramadan pastry 3 Used to break fast 4 Acknowledging that every blessing comes from God 6 Animal of the new year 8 The meaning of 8
A Reading From Mother, Unboxed Author Event March 1, 6 p.m. Riffraff Bookstore + Bar, 60 Valley St #107A Free Galactic Roller Disco: Intro to Skating March 1, 6–7 p.m. The Space, 171 Chestnut St, Suite 200 $20 Screening + Q&A of Secret Mall Apartment March 1, 7–10 p.m. Myrtle, 134 Waterman Ave, East Providence, RI 02914 $12 Politics in the Bucket: Community Conversation about Rhode Island Bills Impacting Vulnerable Groups March 3, 6–8 p.m. Art by Ariel Cruz, 249 Main St, Pawtucket, RI 02860 Free A Reading From Motherdom : Author Event March 3, 7 p.m. Riffraff Bookstore + Bar, 60 Valley St #107A Free The John Allmark Quintet March 4, 7–10 p.m. Myrtle, 134 Waterman Ave, East Providence, RI 02914 Free Sounds of Resistance From Palestine March 5, 6–8 p.m. The Underground, 75 Waterman St, Room 001 Free
c Salsa Class Series Wednesdays, February 25–April 15, 6–7 p.m. Roger Williams Gateway Center, 1197 Broad St Free Imperial Boomerang Teach-In February 27, 5:15 p.m. Metcalf Research Building, 190 Thayer St, Friedman Auditorium Free Bill Bartholomew (full band) / Good Judgement : Live Music February 27, 8–11 p.m. Myrtle, 134 Waterman Ave, East Providence, RI 02914 Free Dance Party February 27, 8 p.m.–midnight Riffraff Bookstore + Bar, 60 Valley St #107A Free Silent Book Club February 28, 11 a.m.–1 p.m. Public Shop & Gallery, 50 Agnes St Free Neolithic Record Release Show: Live Music February 28, doors at 7 p.m., show starts at 7:30 AS220 Black Box, 95 Empire St $15 Speculative Fiction Meetup (no reading required): Conflict Resolution & Justice March 1, 12:30–2 p.m. Red Ink Community Library, 130 Cypress St Free Yoga & Writing Expressive Arts Therapy Group March 1, 3–5 p.m. The Space, 171 Chestnut St, Suite 200 $44
JON CORBIN B’28 is outside looking in as Iranian protestors hold the line against the Khamenei government.
