vox--2020-09-04--Big Oil’s hopes are pinned on plastics. It won’t end well.

The fossil fuel industry has not been doing well lately .
Even before the Covid-19 pandemic hit , growth in global demand had slowed to 1 percent annually .
Now , lockdowns and distancing to stop the spread of the coronavirus have decimated the industry .
The International Energy Agency ( IEA ) recently released projections of rapid short-term decline in global demand , to the tune of 9 percent for oil , 8 percent for coal , and 5 percent for gas .
Depending on how long and severe the economic crisis proves to be , it will take @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , with electric vehicles cutting into oil demand by the end of the decade , it may never fully recover .
Industry analysts like Carbon Tracker ’ s Kingsmill Bond are speculating that 2019 may turn out to be the peak of fossil fuel demand , and historically , in other industries , a peak in demand “ tends to mark the beginning of a period of low prices and poor returns , ” says Bond .
But the industry has a response to this dire forecast , and it can be summarized @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , plastics represent a fairly small sliver of oil demand .
Annually , the world consumes around 4,500 million tonnes ( mt ) of oil but only around 1,000mt of petrochemicals ( oil and natural gas used to make chemical products ) , and of that 1,000mt , only about 350mt are plastics .
( A tonne is a metric ton , about 1.1 US tons . )
Nonetheless , plastics are commonly projected to be the biggest source of new demand for oil over coming decades — in some projections , the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ projections that the industry is using to justify billions in new projects , as oil companies across the world shift investment toward petrochemicals .
And Big Oil is working its hardest to make the projections come true : The New York Times just ran an investigative piece revealing the industry ’ s plans to push more plastic , and plastic waste , into Kenya .
Plastics are the thin reed upon which the industry is placing all its hopes .
But a new report released this week by Carbon Tracker throws a big @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
It argues that , far from a reliable source of growth , plastics are uniquely vulnerable to disruption .
They are coming under increasing scrutiny and regulation across the world .
Huge consumer product companies like Unilever are phasing them out .
And the public is turning against them .
If existing solutions are fully implemented , growth in plastics could fall to zero .
And if that happens , then there is no remaining source of net oil demand growth and 2019 will almost certainly prove to be the year of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ look at a few highlights from the report .
Plastics are supposed to drive most oil demand growth The report breaks down the projections of two widely respected sources of energy data and analysis , BP and the IEA .
From 2020 to 2040 , BP expects plastics to represent 95 percent of the net growth in demand for oil .
In the IEA projections , plastics are the biggest single source of demand growth , representing 45 percent of the total .
Both BP and IEA have the plastics industry growing at @ @ @ @ @ @ @ year .
Oil majors are more bullish .
They claim the plastics industry will maintain the rate of growth it has shown since 2010 , i.e.
, 4 percent .
( For instance , Exxon touted 4 percent at its May 2020 investor day . )
That kind of growth would mean a doubling of demand in 18 to 24 years , “ and this appears to be what the industry is tooling up for , ” says the report .
“ The petrochemical industry already faces huge overcapacity , but is planning @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on 80mt of new capacity.
” Global and national oil companies are shifting investment into petrochemicals , from Saudi Arabia to China .
But the industry ’ s rosy growth projections may not come to pass .
“ In order to reach global demand growth of 4 percent , you ’ ve got to have 2 percent growth across the OECD , 4 percent growth in China , and 6 percent growth in the rest of the world , ” says Bond , a lead author of the report .
“ I would @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a bit of a stretch.
” Four reasons plastics may not grow as forecasted Industry projections of growth in plastics take place in a bit of a dreamworld , ignoring several recent trends and changes .
The report identifies four .
1 .
Rising carbon emissions are not cool in the age of the Paris agreement Calculating the carbon footprint of plastics is a complicated business — it produces CO2 at every stage of its lifecycle , including disposal — but the best research suggests that it averages out to about 5 tonnes @ @ @ @ @ @ @ more if it ’ s burned , less if it ’ s landfilled ) .
That ’ s roughly twice the CO2 produced by a tonne of oil .
If plastic demand were to grow as projected , annual emissions associated with plastic would double by mid-century , to around 3.5 gigatons .
And if it did that , SYSTEMIQ ( a company that researches and pushes for changes in materials use , which provided input to the report ) calculates that it would use 19 percent of the entire remaining global carbon @ @ @ @ @ @ @ planning on doubling its carbon footprint while the rest of the world plans to phase out emissions , ” says the report , “ clearly makes no sense.
” Policymakers aren ’ t going to let it happen .
2 .
Plastic produces external costs that are almost equal to its total market value The plastics industry imposes all kinds of costs on society that it doesn ’ t have to pay ( “ externalities ” ) : It emits carbon dioxide , it generates air pollution , it must be collected and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it ends up in the ocean .
Adding up all those costs , drawing on the latest research , the report comes up with with a total externalities cost of between $ 800 and $ 1,400 per tonne , with “ at least $ 1,000 ” used as a reasonable rule of thumb .
And this doesn ’ t include some of the costs the report couldn ’ t quantify , including microplastics ( in seas , waters , and food ) and “ terrestrial leakage , ” or plastic that ends up @ @ @ @ @ @ @ costs in mind , the report looks at the subsidies and taxes facing the industry , to find out if any of these costs are incorporated .
Long story short : they are not .
The industry receives roughly $ 33 per tonne in subsidies ( $ 12 billion cumulatively ) , which isn ’ t that much in the grand scheme of things , but it turns out to be more than the industry pays in taxes ( $ 2 billion cumulatively , with optimistic assumptions ) .
All told , then @ @ @ @ @ @ @ $ 1,000 in unpaid external costs , which is about $ 1 per kilogram , or $ 350 billion a year .
“ The average cost of a tonne of plastic is $ 1,000 - $ 1,500 , ” the report says , “ so the subsidy from the rest of society to the plastics industry is only a little less than the total sales value of the industry.
” Those “ unpaid ” external costs are being paid today , of course — they don ’ t vanish .
It ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ by poor people and people living in poor countries , the ones living next to toxic incinerators , gathering plastic waste , and living with the most concentrated air and water pollution .
Imposing costs on poor people so that wealthy plastics companies can profit is a human rights abuse .
The report summarizes four aspects of the industry ’ s wasteful ways .
First , the best research indicates that about 36 percent of all plastic produced is for single-use applications .
Second , 40 percent of plastic waste is mismanaged — @ @ @ @ @ @ @ leakage , 22 % in open burning , and 14 % in terrestrial leakage , ” the report says .
Third , recycling rates in the industry are abysmally low ; 20 percent of plastics are sent for recycling , but only about 5 percent actually end up substituting for virgin plastic .
( Compare that to 60-80 percent recycling rates in steel , aluminum , and paper . )
And fourth , there have been virtually no guidelines or regulations on the design of plastic products , so just about anything goes @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of disposable , nonrecyclable plastic junk .
The industry has mostly responded to these kinds of criticisms with misdirection and propaganda rather than improving its products ( which , to be fair , has traditionally worked pretty well for it ) .
“ This is not an industry which has focused at all on efficiency or maximising utility , ” the report says .
“ It is a bloated behemoth , ripe for disruption.
” And the public is ready to disrupt it .
4 .
The public is waking up to the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the public and lawmakers are becoming more concerned and active on climate change , and “ it is simply delusional for investors in the plastics sector to believe that the sector will be immune from attempts to resolve this issue , ” the report says .
The public is also upset about plastic waste , especially in oceans .
An IPSOS polls in 2019 found that between 70 and 80 percent of the public wants to reduce plastics and force industry to go along , including a ban on single-use plastics .
This @ @ @ @ @ @ @ crack down , as in the EU , which introduced a €800/ton tax on unrecycled plastic waste as part of its green stimulus package .
Evidence shows that demand for plastic is largely saturated in OECD countries , which means the bulk of the alleged demand growth is supposed to come from China and other emerging markets , but there , too , steps are being taken to curtail plastic use and disposal .
China recently banned a range of single-use plastic items ; many other countries are expected to follow suit .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ bloated and wasteful , it imposes enormous social and ecological costs , and people are sick of it .
That is not a recipe for robust growth .
There are solutions at hand for reducing growth in plastic As policymakers get serious about plastics , there are a number of existing solutions ready to go , which are cheaper than the status quo .
Those solutions were itemized and costed out by SYSTEMIQ in a report called “ Breaking the Plastic Wave , ” released earlier this year .
Overall , bending the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the three most scalable and cost-effective solutions — reducing demand through design , reuse , and new delivery models ; substituting other products like compostables or paper ; and better recycling — together constitutes what SYSTEMIQ calls the System Change Scenario ( SCS ) .
Under SCS , total global plastic demand plateaus in 2020 and peaks in 2030 .
Notably , SCS is also cheaper for industry than business as usual .
Investment in new technologies goes up , but investment in virgin production and conversion are sharply reduced .
SCS would @ @ @ @ @ @ @ spend on plastics ( mainly on waste ) and create more jobs than business as usual .
If you are interested in the details — how to better design plastic products , make them last longer , make then more recyclable , and ensure they are properly disposed of — the SYSTEMIQ report goes deep in the weeds .
Suffice it to say , solutions to the profusion of cheap plastic and plastic waste are available .
They would save money relative to the status quo .
They would reduce pollution and create @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ensure that global demand for plastics peaks and begins declining within a decade , which would in turn ensure that global demand for oil does the same .
Policymakers just have to step up .
The politics of plastics are not favorable for Big Oil Pouring money into plastics is a desperate gamble for Big Oil .
Social pressure , technological innovations , and economic trends are all closing in on its main product , so it ’ s trying to make a lateral move into another bloated , polluting industry .
The @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , even as it pours billions into capacity expansions .
If the anticipated 4 percent growth does not miraculously manifest out of the coronavirus-hobbled global economy in the next few years — and there are many reasons to believe it won ’ t — the cumulative overcapacity will be crippling , enough to suppress prices and investment returns for years .
By the time the industry crawls out of the hole , it will find a different world , with electric vehicles and heat pumps eating away at its core market .
“ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ will lose the cyclicality of oil , ” says Bond , “ I ’ m sure we ’ ll have higher prices again at some stage in the future .
But it is cyclicality around a falling mean.
” Plastics are probably not going to save the oil and gas industry .
It is more likely that the peak point in humanity ’ s centuries-long , planet-shaping fossil fuel binge is already in the rearview mirror , and that “ cyclicality around a falling mean ” will be the core truth of fossil @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
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The fossil fuel industry has not been doing well lately. Even before the Covid-19 pandemic hit, growth in global demand had slowed to 1 percent annually. Now, lockdowns and distancing to stop the spread of the coronavirus have decimated the industry. The International Energy Agency (IEA) recently released projections of rapid short-term decline in global demand, to the tune of 9 percent for oil, 8 percent for coal, and 5 percent for gas.
Depending on how long and severe the economic crisis proves to be, it will take years for demand to recover. Indeed, with electric vehicles cutting into oil demand by the end of the decade, it may never fully recover. Industry analysts like Carbon Tracker’s Kingsmill Bond are speculating that 2019 may turn out to be the peak of fossil fuel demand, and historically, in other industries, a peak in demand “tends to mark the beginning of a period of low prices and poor returns,” says Bond.
But the industry has a response to this dire forecast, and it can be summarized in one word: plastics.
Overall, plastics represent a fairly small sliver of oil demand. Annually, the world consumes around 4,500 million tonnes (mt) of oil but only around 1,000mt of petrochemicals (oil and natural gas used to make chemical products), and of that 1,000mt, only about 350mt are plastics. (A tonne is a metric ton, about 1.1 US tons.)
Nonetheless, plastics are commonly projected to be the biggest source of new demand for oil over coming decades — in some projections, the only real source. It is these projections that the industry is using to justify billions in new projects, as oil companies across the world shift investment toward petrochemicals.
And Big Oil is working its hardest to make the projections come true: The New York Times recently ran an investigative piece revealing the industry’s plans to push more plastic, and plastic waste, into Kenya. Plastics are the thin reed upon which the industry is placing all its hopes.
But a new report released in September by Carbon Tracker throws a big bucket of cold water on these hopes. It argues that, far from a reliable source of growth, plastics are uniquely vulnerable to disruption. They are coming under increasing scrutiny and regulation across the world. Huge consumer product companies like Unilever are phasing them out. And the public is turning against them.
If existing solutions are fully implemented, growth in plastics could fall to zero. And if that happens, then there is no remaining source of net oil demand growth and 2019 will almost certainly prove to be the year of peak fossil fuels.
Let’s look at a few highlights from the report.
Plastics are supposed to drive most oil demand growth
The report breaks down the projections of two widely respected sources of energy data and analysis, BP and the IEA.
From 2020 to 2040, BP expects plastics to represent 95 percent of the net growth in demand for oil.
In the IEA projections, plastics are the biggest single source of demand growth, representing 45 percent of the total. Both BP and IEA have the plastics industry growing at about 2 percent annually in the coming year.
Oil majors are more bullish. They claim the plastics industry will maintain the rate of growth it has shown since 2010, i.e., 4 percent. (For instance, Exxon touted 4 percent at its May 2020 investor day.) That kind of growth would mean a doubling of demand in 18 to 24 years, “and this appears to be what the industry is tooling up for,” says the report. “The petrochemical industry already faces huge overcapacity, but is planning to spend a further $400 billion on 80mt of new capacity.”
Global and national oil companies are shifting investment into petrochemicals, from Saudi Arabia to China. But the industry’s rosy growth projections may not come to pass.
“In order to reach global demand growth of 4 percent, you’ve got to have 2 percent growth across the OECD, 4 percent growth in China, and 6 percent growth in the rest of the world,” says Bond, a lead author of the report. “I would suggest that all three of those are a bit of a stretch.”
Four reasons plastics may not grow as forecasted
Industry projections of growth in plastics take place in a bit of a dreamworld, ignoring several recent trends and changes. The report identifies four.
1. Rising carbon emissions are not cool in the age of the Paris agreement
Calculating the carbon footprint of plastics is a complicated business — it produces CO2 at every stage of its lifecycle, including disposal — but the best research suggests that it averages out to about 5 tonnes of CO2 per tonne of plastic (more if it’s burned, less if it’s landfilled). That’s roughly twice the CO2 produced by a tonne of oil.
If plastic demand were to grow as projected, annual emissions associated with plastic would double by mid-century, to around 3.5 gigatons. And if it did that, SYSTEMIQ (a company that researches and pushes for changes in materials use, which provided input to the report) calculates that it would use 19 percent of the entire remaining global carbon budget.
“To have one sector planning on doubling its carbon footprint while the rest of the world plans to phase out emissions,” says the report, “clearly makes no sense.” Policymakers aren’t going to let it happen.
2. Plastic produces external costs that are almost equal to its total market value
The plastics industry imposes all kinds of costs on society that it doesn’t have to pay (“externalities”): It emits carbon dioxide, it generates air pollution, it must be collected and sorted, and a great deal of it ends up in the ocean.
Adding up all those costs, drawing on the latest research, the report comes up with with a total externalities cost of between $800 and $1,400 per tonne, with “at least $1,000” used as a reasonable rule of thumb.
And this doesn’t include some of the costs the report couldn’t quantify, including microplastics (in seas, waters, and food) and “terrestrial leakage,” or plastic that ends up as rubbish on land.
With these costs in mind, the report looks at the subsidies and taxes facing the industry, to find out if any of these costs are incorporated. Long story short: they are not. The industry receives roughly $33 per tonne in subsidies ($12 billion cumulatively), which isn’t that much in the grand scheme of things, but it turns out to be more than the industry pays in taxes ($2 billion cumulatively, with optimistic assumptions).
All told, then, a tonne of plastic imposes about $1,000 in unpaid external costs, which is about $1 per kilogram, or $350 billion a year. “The average cost of a tonne of plastic is $1,000 - $1,500,” the report says, “so the subsidy from the rest of society to the plastics industry is only a little less than the total sales value of the industry.”
Those “unpaid” external costs are being paid today, of course — they don’t vanish. It’s just that they are overwhelmingly being paid by poor people and people living in poor countries, the ones living next to toxic incinerators, gathering plastic waste, and living with the most concentrated air and water pollution.
Imposing costs on poor people so that wealthy plastics companies can profit is a human rights abuse.
3. The plastics industry is extraordinarily wasteful
The report summarizes four aspects of the industry’s wasteful ways.
First, the best research indicates that about 36 percent of all plastic produced is for single-use applications. Second, 40 percent of plastic waste is mismanaged — “5% ends up in ocean leakage, 22% in open burning, and 14% in terrestrial leakage,” the report says. Third, recycling rates in the industry are abysmally low; 20 percent of plastics are sent for recycling, but only about 5 percent actually end up substituting for virgin plastic. (Compare that to 60-80 percent recycling rates in steel, aluminum, and paper.)
Related The race to save the planet from plastic
And fourth, there have been virtually no guidelines or regulations on the design of plastic products, so just about anything goes. The result has been a tide of disposable, nonrecyclable plastic junk.
The industry has mostly responded to these kinds of criticisms with misdirection and propaganda rather than improving its products (which, to be fair, has traditionally worked pretty well for it).
“This is not an industry which has focused at all on efficiency or maximising utility,” the report says. “It is a bloated behemoth, ripe for disruption.”
And the public is ready to disrupt it.
4. The public is waking up to the enormous costs of plastic
Broadly speaking, the public and lawmakers are becoming more concerned and active on climate change, and “it is simply delusional for investors in the plastics sector to believe that the sector will be immune from attempts to resolve this issue,” the report says.
The public is also upset about plastic waste, especially in oceans. An IPSOS polls in 2019 found that between 70 and 80 percent of the public wants to reduce plastics and force industry to go along, including a ban on single-use plastics.
This kind of sentiment is driving regulators to crack down, as in the EU, which introduced a €800/ton tax on unrecycled plastic waste as part of its green stimulus package.
Evidence shows that demand for plastic is largely saturated in OECD countries, which means the bulk of the alleged demand growth is supposed to come from China and other emerging markets, but there, too, steps are being taken to curtail plastic use and disposal. China recently banned a range of single-use plastic items; many other countries are expected to follow suit.
New York state began enforcing its ban on plastic bags on October 19, a policy that took effect on March 1.
“You see plastic bags hanging in trees, blowing down the streets, in landfills and in our waterways, and there is no doubt they are doing tremendous damage,” Gov. Andrew Cuomo said when he signed the legislation. “Twelve million barrels of oil are used to make the plastic bags we use every year and by 2050 there will be more plastic by weight in the oceans than fish.”
In summary, the plastics industry is bloated and wasteful, it imposes enormous social and ecological costs, and people are sick of it. That is not a recipe for robust growth.
There are solutions at hand for reducing growth in plastic
As policymakers get serious about plastics, there are a number of existing solutions ready to go, which are cheaper than the status quo. Those solutions were itemized and costed out by SYSTEMIQ in a report called “Breaking the Plastic Wave,” released earlier this year.
Overall, bending the plastics curve looks like this:
Maximizing the three most scalable and cost-effective solutions — reducing demand through design, reuse, and new delivery models; substituting other products like compostables or paper; and better recycling — together constitutes what SYSTEMIQ calls the System Change Scenario (SCS).
Under SCS, total global plastic demand plateaus in 2020 and peaks in 2030.
(These projections were done before Covid-19, so as in many other areas, it’s possible that the peak has been pulled forward. Wood Mackenzie projects a 4 percent drop in plastics demand in 2020, though it also says the virus “has paused the shift away from single-use plastics.”)
Notably, SCS is also cheaper for industry than business as usual. Investment in new technologies goes up, but investment in virgin production and conversion are sharply reduced.
SCS would also reduce the amount of money governments spend on plastics (mainly on waste) and create more jobs than business as usual.
If you are interested in the details — how to better design plastic products, make them last longer, make then more recyclable, and ensure they are properly disposed of — the SYSTEMIQ report goes deep in the weeds. Suffice it to say, solutions to the profusion of cheap plastic and plastic waste are available. They would save money relative to the status quo. They would reduce pollution and create jobs.
And together, they would ensure that global demand for plastics peaks and begins declining within a decade, which would in turn ensure that global demand for oil does the same.
Policymakers just have to step up.
The politics of plastics are not favorable for Big Oil
Pouring money into plastics is a desperate gamble for Big Oil. Social pressure, technological innovations, and economic trends are all closing in on its main product, so it’s trying to make a lateral move into another bloated, polluting industry.
The petrochemicals industry is already burdened with overcapacity, even as it pours billions into capacity expansions. If the anticipated 4 percent growth does not miraculously manifest out of the coronavirus-hobbled global economy in the next few years — and there are many reasons to believe it won’t — the cumulative overcapacity will be crippling, enough to suppress prices and investment returns for years.
By the time the industry crawls out of the hole, it will find a different world, with electric vehicles and heat pumps eating away at its core market.
“I’m not suggesting that we will lose the cyclicality of oil,” says Bond, “I’m sure we’ll have higher prices again at some stage in the future. But it is cyclicality around a falling mean.”
Plastics are probably not going to save the oil and gas industry. It is more likely that the peak point in humanity’s centuries-long, planet-shaping fossil fuel binge is already in the rearview mirror, and that “cyclicality around a falling mean” will be the core truth of fossil fuels for the remainder of the century.


vox--2020-09-04--Kenosha’s looting is a symptom of a decrepit democracy

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden made a forceful denunciation this week of the property destruction that followed the Jacob Blake shooting in Kenosha , Wisconsin , saying “ rioting is not protesting.
” “ I want to make it absolutely clear , so I ’ m going to be very clear about all of this , rioting is not protesting , ” he said .
“ Looting is not protesting .
Setting fires is not protesting .
None of this is protesting .
It ’ s lawlessness , plain and simple.
” Biden ’ s rebuke of rioters and adulation @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
President Donald Trump argued during his own trip to Kenosha that “ these are not acts of peaceful protest , but really domestic terror.
” Attorney General Bill Barr similarly denounced “ mob violence.
” Barr urged Americans concerned about police shootings to trust the “ due process ” of the law and allow “ dispassionate , reasoned decision based on an analysis of the situation.
” It ’ s not hard to find denunciation of looting from local officials — from Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot arguing that rioting was “ not @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Minnesota Gov .
Tim Walz decrying property damage as “ attacking civil society.
” These politicians insistence on nondestructive protest echo President Richard Nixon ’ s civil rights era appeals for law and order amid riots against racial injustice .
“ Dissent is a necessary ingredient of change , ” Nixon said in 1968 .
“ But in a system of government that provides for peaceful change , there is no cause that justifies resort to violence.
” Yet what Nixon , Trump , Biden , and other elected officials miss is that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ provide meaningful avenues for peaceful change — particularly on police violence .
If looting and rioting have no place in a well-functioning democracy , then perhaps we should pause to consider that these are signs that Americans are not , in fact , in a functioning democracy .
Rioting and unrest , while tragic and destructive , remains a historically familiar and rational response to state violence and weak democratic institutions .
From the Boston Tea Party , to John Brown ’ s raid on Harpers Ferry , to the 1992 Los Angeles @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a form of protest and resistance for centuries in the United States .
Today ’ s riots , still relatively rare , roil after years of legal logjams and gridlock on meaningful policing reform .
In the executive branch , the recommendations from President Obama ’ s Task Force on 21st Century Policing failed to be implemented nationwide .
In the judicial branch , legal precedent still protects officers from the consequences of deadly force with qualified immunity .
In the legislative branch , this summer ’ s police reform bills have stalled @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the local level even in the bluest of districts like in New York City or Minneapolis , where police brutality persists , despite years of activism and electoral support for reform candidates .
In declining to reconcile the failure of America ’ s democratic institutions and in their strong denouncements of riots as political protest , elected officials like Trump and Biden avoid the truth — there is no more effective force for stopping riots than making a serious effort to stop police from killing Black people .
Why looting happened in Kenosha @ @ @ @ @ @ @ On Sunday , August 23 , Jacob Blake was shot in the back by officers as they attempted to arrest him in Kenosha .
Graphic video of the shooting shows an officer holding Blake by the end of his shirt and firing bullets into his back as he attempted to enter into his car .
By that night , protesters and demonstrators gathered to express their outrage , and were further agitated as police pepper-sprayed them .
As the night went on , demonstrators set fire to dump trucks and local buildings .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ of unrest and protests that mirrored destructive demonstrations seen earlier this summer following police violence .
Perhaps we should pause to consider that looting and rioting are signs that Americans are not in a functioning democracy The unrest in places like Kenosha happens as local leaders show an inability to enact basic police reforms like firing police officers known for misconduct .
Regardless of the specific details of any police shooting , Black people have seen the same pattern play out over and over .
As civil rights attorney and Democratic mayor of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Frey said of his inability to fire wayward officers : “ We ’ re hamstrung by the architecture of this system that prevents change and protects officers from being held accountable .
And if we really want to see the massive culture shift that is essential , we need to have that ability .
And right now , in many instances , the truth is we don ’ t. ” Executive officials ’ failure to fire violent officers on the front end is also matched with judicial officials ’ failure to prosecute them @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in the absence of guilty verdicts after the killings of Elijah McClain , Rekia Boyd , Trayvon Martin , Sandra Bland , Tamir Rice , Korryn Gaines , Eric Garner , Aiyana Mo ’ Nay Stanley-Jones , Michael Brown , Eleanor Bumpurs , Freddie Gray , and many , many others , the courts — a key site of democratic life — consistently fail to provide justice for Black people slain , and deterrence to police or vigilantes who would unjustly slay Black folks again .
In absence of that , and in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , some people lose faith in democratic institutions .
“ I don ’ t know where they got them motherfucking jurors from , but that was some straight-up bullshit , ” Valerie Castile said in a Facebook Live video in 2017 after the police officer who killed her son , Philando , was found not guilty .
“ They ’ re gon na keep on killing us , as long as we just sit down and just take it.
” “ I just want to say one thing to everybody out there , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ what you do , ” she added .
“ Do what your heart desires because that shit wasn ’ t right .
Because I ’ m here to say that , and fuck the police.
” Instead , the heroes held up in media are the family members and activists who forgive their attackers or retain faith in the political system .
Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah remarked on this selective storytelling in her GQ profile of Dylann Roof , who killed nine Black people at a church in Charleston , South Carolina , in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ startling when one of the shooting survivors told the court that “ Roof belonged in the pit of hell ” : This same complex communal response helped fuel the riots in Kenosha last week .
After watching a local Black man shot seven times in the back in front of his children , some residents were saddened by property destruction , and others were fine with it , according to New York Times reporter Julie Bosman .
Summarizing her reporting on The Daily , she said : Incubated by generations of rejected appeals @ @ @ @ @ @ @ bodies , the lure of violent unrest grows .
This is evident not only in the upheaval that stretched from Atlanta to Wisconsin this year , but in the periodic upheaval that has repeated across the last century .
We tend to lionize peaceful movements — and forget the riots that also brought change In August 1943 , the avenues of Harlem in New York City descended into chaos .
Black people ran through the streets with their arms filled with coats , jewelry , and furniture .
The young and the old @ @ @ @ @ @ @ looted as much as possible from white store owners .
A young Malcolm X watching it all unfold recounted seeing “ all of these Negroes hollering and running north from 125th Street .
Some of them were loaded down with armfuls of stuff.
” The rioting , the destruction , was triggered by news of a police shooting .
This is one of several scenes of unrest depicted in the University of Massachusetts Amherst historian Traci Parker ’ s book Department Stores and the Black Freedom Movement .
The book recounts Black activism @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and violent , unfurling at stores .
While Parker covers the famous sit-ins , she also writes , that “ not all expressions of Black consumer protest and outrage , however , were so composed and organized ; in fact , several pointedly sought violent and destructive revenge.
” During riots like the one in Harlem , Parker explains that looters “ were frustrated and angered by not only the reported killing but also the history of racial oppression and violence.
” In her book , Parker writes that riots didn ’ t @ @ @ @ @ @ @ at times even an effective mode of political advocacy prompting biased stories to reflect on biased business practices .
“ Wartime riots not only ended race discrimination in the marketplace but also created an awareness and discourse that would benefit the black freedom struggle in the postwar era.
” Parker explains the decades-long persistence of both nonviolent and violent protests unfolding at retailers should inform how we understand the fight for racial justice .
Rebutting the binary politicians like Bill Clinton posed last month between the legacy of nonviolent figure John Lewis and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ tells Vox that “ we have to understand that the Black freedom movement isn ’ t always about an either-or , or a versus.
” “ We should be thinking about this as there are different organizations , different tactics , and strategies that are useful to get to a particular endpoint , ” she said .
“ It doesn ’ t have to be all or nothing , one or the other .
I ’ m not advocating for looting , right .
But I think that there could be other ways @ @ @ @ @ @ @ at the looting in Watts in 1965 , Detroit in 1967 , Los Angeles in 1992 , or Baltimore in 2015 , many of America ’ s most infamous instances of racial unrest start after police brutality .
In fact , the autopsies and commissions investigating these uprisings describe a direct relationship between police violence and property destruction .
Summarizing the findings of the 1968 Kerner Commission that investigated the Civil Rights era riots , Princeton professor Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes that “ the top three grievances it found in Black communities were police @ @ @ @ @ @ @ substandard housing.
” Today it is perhaps the New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie who most pithily expressed how this relationship works .
“ Kenosha would be quiet if not for an incident of police brutality and abuse , ” he wrote this week .
“ The same is true for other cities where rioting and disorder have taken place.
” Nothing extinguishes a burning skyline like equality and justice for all Consulting the historical record , we can see looting isn ’ t some random act of destruction .
It isn ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , ” as Trump describes .
It is political speech , at times persuasive , at times not , that is made all the more common by weak democratic institutions .
Like America ’ s burning forests , America ’ s burning cities are the result of years of policy decisions .
And like tackling climate change , there is no quick fix for the underlying racial inequality that fuels unrest .
Yet for those serious about tackling the problem at the scale that it exists , blueprints are present .
As Martin @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in 1967 : If politicians don ’ t want to see cities burn , they must prioritize real change .
The policy options are endless .
Establishment Democrats have introduced the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act of 2020 which has provisions to make police more accountable in court .
Progressives Democrats have introduced the Breathe Act which provides a framework for defunding .
At the local level , moderate reformers have suggested ideas such as 8 Can ’ t Wait ’ s plan to revamp police use-of-force policies .
More progressive activists @ @ @ @ @ @ @ move toward less violent emergency response systems .
Many plans exist , but too few make it through the gears of American bureaucracy .
Elected officials have options for expanding social justice and progress in communities long denied it .
But until politicians heed demands to end police brutality , America will continue to struggle with periodic riots and unrest , as it has for generations .
Help keep Vox free for all Millions turn to Vox each month to understand what ’ s happening in the news , from the coronavirus crisis @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , quite possibly , the most consequential presidential election of our lifetimes .
Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment : to empower you through understanding .
But our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources — particularly during a pandemic and an economic downturn .
Even when the economy and the news advertising market recovers , your support will be a critical part of sustaining our resource-intensive work , and helping everyone make sense of an increasingly chaotic world .
Contribute today from as little as @ @ @

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden made a forceful denunciation this week of the property destruction that followed the Jacob Blake shooting in Kenosha, Wisconsin, saying “rioting is not protesting.”
“I want to make it absolutely clear, so I’m going to be very clear about all of this, rioting is not protesting,” he said. “Looting is not protesting. Setting fires is not protesting. None of this is protesting. It’s lawlessness, plain and simple.”
Biden’s rebuke of rioters and adulation of peaceful protesters reflects a bipartisan sentiment.
President Donald Trump argued during his own trip to Kenosha that “these are not acts of peaceful protest, but really domestic terror.” Attorney General Bill Barr similarly denounced “mob violence.” Barr urged Americans concerned about police shootings to trust the “due process” of the law and allow “dispassionate, reasoned decision based on an analysis of the situation.”
It’s not hard to find denunciation of looting from local officials — from Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot arguing that rioting was “not legitimate First Amendment-protected speech,” to Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz decrying property damage as “attacking civil society.”
These politicians insistence on nondestructive protest echo President Richard Nixon’s civil rights era appeals for law and order amid riots against racial injustice. “Dissent is a necessary ingredient of change,” Nixon said in 1968. “But in a system of government that provides for peaceful change, there is no cause that justifies resort to violence.”
Yet what Nixon, Trump, Biden, and other elected officials miss is that America’s government frequently fails to provide meaningful avenues for peaceful change — particularly on police violence.
If looting and rioting have no place in a well-functioning democracy, then perhaps we should pause to consider that these are signs that Americans are not, in fact, in a functioning democracy.
Rioting and unrest, while tragic and destructive, remains a historically familiar and rational response to state violence and weak democratic institutions. From the Boston Tea Party, to John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry, to the 1992 Los Angeles riots, violent insurrections have served as a form of protest and resistance for centuries in the United States. Today’s riots, still relatively rare, roil after years of legal logjams and gridlock on meaningful policing reform.
In the executive branch, the recommendations from President Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing failed to be implemented nationwide. In the judicial branch, legal precedent still protects officers from the consequences of deadly force with qualified immunity. In the legislative branch, this summer’s police reform bills have stalled out. The institutional stalemate persists at the local level even in the bluest of districts like in New York City or Minneapolis, where police brutality persists, despite years of activism and electoral support for reform candidates.
In declining to reconcile the failure of America’s democratic institutions and in their strong denouncements of riots as political protest, elected officials like Trump and Biden avoid the truth — there is no more effective force for stopping riots than making a serious effort to stop police from killing Black people.
Why looting happened in Kenosha and elsewhere in the US this summer
On Sunday, August 23, Jacob Blake was shot in the back by officers as they attempted to arrest him in Kenosha. Graphic video of the shooting shows an officer holding Blake by the end of his shirt and firing bullets into his back as he attempted to enter into his car.
By that night, protesters and demonstrators gathered to express their outrage, and were further agitated as police pepper-sprayed them. As the night went on, demonstrators set fire to dump trucks and local buildings. It was the beginning of a week of unrest and protests that mirrored destructive demonstrations seen earlier this summer following police violence.
Perhaps we should pause to consider that looting and rioting are signs that Americans are not in a functioning democracy
The unrest in places like Kenosha happens as local leaders show an inability to enact basic police reforms like firing police officers known for misconduct. Regardless of the specific details of any police shooting, Black people have seen the same pattern play out over and over.
As civil rights attorney and Democratic mayor of the very liberal city of Minneapolis Jacob Frey said of his inability to fire wayward officers: “We’re hamstrung by the architecture of this system that prevents change and protects officers from being held accountable. And if we really want to see the massive culture shift that is essential, we need to have that ability. And right now, in many instances, the truth is we don’t.”
Executive officials’ failure to fire violent officers on the front end is also matched with judicial officials’ failure to prosecute them on the back end.
As observed in the absence of guilty verdicts after the killings of Elijah McClain, Rekia Boyd, Trayvon Martin, Sandra Bland, Tamir Rice, Korryn Gaines, Eric Garner, Aiyana Mo’Nay Stanley-Jones, Michael Brown, Eleanor Bumpurs, Freddie Gray, and many, many others, the courts — a key site of democratic life — consistently fail to provide justice for Black people slain, and deterrence to police or vigilantes who would unjustly slay Black folks again.
America’s government repeatedly fails to provide meaningful avenues for peaceful change.
In absence of that, and in the presence of racial violence and discrimination, some people lose faith in democratic institutions. “I don’t know where they got them motherfucking jurors from, but that was some straight-up bullshit,” Valerie Castile said in a Facebook Live video in 2017 after the police officer who killed her son, Philando, was found not guilty. “They’re gonna keep on killing us, as long as we just sit down and just take it.”
“I just want to say one thing to everybody out there, I don’t give a fuck what you do,” she added. “Do what your heart desires because that shit wasn’t right. Because I’m here to say that, and fuck the police.”
Castile’s disillusionment is common. It’s human. It’s rarely acknowledged, however.
Instead, the heroes held up in media are the family members and activists who forgive their attackers or retain faith in the political system. Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah remarked on this selective storytelling in her GQ profile of Dylann Roof, who killed nine Black people at a church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015. She said it was somewhat startling when one of the shooting survivors told the court that “Roof belonged in the pit of hell”:
Their vitriol was warranted but also unexpected, since in most of the press coverage of the shooting it had largely been erased. Almost every white person I spoke with in Charleston during the trial praised the church’s resounding forgiveness of the young white man who shot their members down. The forgiveness was an absolution of everything. No one made mention that this forgiveness was individual, not collective. Some of the victims and their families forgave him, and some of them did not.
This same complex communal response helped fuel the riots in Kenosha last week. After watching a local Black man shot seven times in the back in front of his children, some residents were saddened by property destruction, and others were fine with it, according to New York Times reporter Julie Bosman. Summarizing her reporting on The Daily, she said:
A lot of people said, look, this is a totally appropriate response to what happened to Jacob Blake. This is a totally appropriate response to the oppression of the Black community in this city and in this country. Like I talked to a man who was standing there, smoking a cigarette. And just said, “Look, I’m really sorry to see this, but like if this is what it takes, then this is what it takes.”
Incubated by generations of rejected appeals to legislative, judicial, and executive bodies, the lure of violent unrest grows. This is evident not only in the upheaval that stretched from Atlanta to Wisconsin this year, but in the periodic upheaval that has repeated across the last century.
We tend to lionize peaceful movements — and forget the riots that also brought change
In August 1943, the avenues of Harlem in New York City descended into chaos. Black people ran through the streets with their arms filled with coats, jewelry, and furniture. The young and the old, the rich and the poor, looted as much as possible from white store owners. A young Malcolm X watching it all unfold recounted seeing “all of these Negroes hollering and running north from 125th Street. Some of them were loaded down with armfuls of stuff.” The rioting, the destruction, was triggered by news of a police shooting.
This is one of several scenes of unrest depicted in the University of Massachusetts Amherst historian Traci Parker’s book Department Stores and the Black Freedom Movement. The book recounts Black activism’s decades-long history, both nonviolent and violent, unfurling at stores. While Parker covers the famous sit-ins, she also writes, that “not all expressions of Black consumer protest and outrage, however, were so composed and organized; in fact, several pointedly sought violent and destructive revenge.” During riots like the one in Harlem, Parker explains that looters “were frustrated and angered by not only the reported killing but also the history of racial oppression and violence.”
In her book, Parker writes that riots didn’t just express public rage. They were at times even an effective mode of political advocacy prompting biased stories to reflect on biased business practices. “Wartime riots not only ended race discrimination in the marketplace but also created an awareness and discourse that would benefit the black freedom struggle in the postwar era.”
Parker explains the decades-long persistence of both nonviolent and violent protests unfolding at retailers should inform how we understand the fight for racial justice. Rebutting the binary politicians like Bill Clinton posed last month between the legacy of nonviolent figure John Lewis and the less compromising Kwame Ture, Parker tells Vox that “we have to understand that the Black freedom movement isn’t always about an either-or, or a versus.”
“We should be thinking about this as there are different organizations, different tactics, and strategies that are useful to get to a particular endpoint,” she said. “It doesn’t have to be all or nothing, one or the other. I’m not advocating for looting, right. But I think that there could be other ways of thinking about this.”
Whether looking at the looting in Watts in 1965, Detroit in 1967, Los Angeles in 1992, or Baltimore in 2015, many of America’s most infamous instances of racial unrest start after police brutality. In fact, the autopsies and commissions investigating these uprisings describe a direct relationship between police violence and property destruction. Summarizing the findings of the 1968 Kerner Commission that investigated the civil rights era riots, Princeton professor Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes that “the top three grievances it found in Black communities were police brutality, unemployment and underemployment, and substandard housing.”
Today it is perhaps the New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie who most pithily expressed how this relationship works. “Kenosha would be quiet if not for an incident of police brutality and abuse,” he wrote this week. “The same is true for other cities where rioting and disorder have taken place.”
Nothing extinguishes a burning skyline like equality and justice for all
Consulting the historical record, we can see looting isn’t some random act of destruction. It isn’t the bloodthirst of the “mob,” as Trump describes. It is political speech, at times persuasive, at times not, that is made all the more common by weak democratic institutions.
Like America’s burning forests, America’s burning cities are the result of years of policy decisions. And like tackling climate change, there is no quick fix for the underlying racial inequality that fuels unrest. Yet for those serious about tackling the problem at the scale that it exists, blueprints are present. As Martin Luther King Jr. explained on similar riots in 1967:
Certain conditions continue to exist in our society, which must be condemned as vigorously as we condemn riots. But in the final analysis, a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice, equality, and humanity. And so in a real sense our nation’s summers of riots are caused by our nation’s winters of delay. And as long as America postpones justice, we stand in the position of having these recurrences of violence and riots over and over again. Social justice and progress are the absolute guarantors of riot prevention.
If politicians don’t want to see cities burn, they must prioritize real change. The policy options are endless. Establishment Democrats have introduced the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act of 2020 which has provisions to make police more accountable in court. Progressives Democrats have introduced the Breathe Act which provides a framework for defunding. At the local level, moderate reformers have suggested ideas such as 8 Can’t Wait’s plan to revamp police use-of-force policies. More progressive activists have pushed the 8 to Abolition to move toward less violent emergency response systems. Many plans exist, but too few make it through the gears of American bureaucracy.
Elected officials have options for expanding social justice and progress in communities long denied it. But until politicians heed demands to end police brutality, America will continue to struggle with periodic riots and unrest, as it has for generations.


vox--2020-09-04--The history of Mulan, from a 6th-century ballad to the live-action Disney movie

“ There have been many tales of the great warrior Mulan , ” says Mulan ’ s father in voice over as Disney ’ s live-action take on Mulan opens .
“ But ancestors , this one is mine.
” It ’ s true , there are a lot of Mulans out there .
The story of Mulan , a young Chinese woman who disguises herself as a man and joins the army to save her father ’ s life , has been told over and over again for the past 1,500 years at least .
It ’ s both @ @ @ @ @ @ @ who is as virtuous as she is strong and brave , is an essential heroine .
And every time we retell her story , we have to make certain that she is still virtuous — whatever virtue means for the time and place where we ’ re telling it .
From the very first Mulan story in the sixth century , every time Mulan seems to be breaking the rules in a rebellious middle finger to the status quo , she ’ s actually following higher and more important rules .
And that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ gender boundaries from being too threatening to existing power structures .
In the end , Mulan ’ s virtue might mean that her rebellion stops being a rebellion at all .
The first recorded version of Mulan dates back to the sixth century .
It ’ s short , and it ends with some thoughts about rabbits .
“ The Ballad of Mulan ” first appeared sometime between the fourth and sixth centuries AD , and it is astonishingly streamlined .
It ’ s a folk song , and it reads like one @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to be sung and memorized and passed from person to person .
It ’ s through this ballad that Mulan took her place as an enduring heroine of Chinese culture , and it contains everything we need to know about what made her such an icon .
The ballad begins with Mulan at her loom , weaving .
But she ’ s sad and preoccupied , and her sighing overwhelms the sound of the loom .
Mulan ’ s elderly father is being called away to war , and he has no son @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Mulan makes up her mind that she ’ ll go instead .
She buys a horse and rides off to war .
The ballad has no details of what exactly happened during Mulan ’ s time in the army ; we just know that she was away for 10 or 12 years , and that she fought valiantly and distinguished herself .
When Mulan returns to the imperial court , the emperor offers her prizes and promotions , but Mulan asks only for a steed — in some translations a horse , in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ can go back home to her family .
Upon arriving at home , Mulan takes off her soldier ’ s uniform and dresses in her old clothes , putting up her hair and applying makeup to her face .
Then she goes outside to meet her old war buddies , and they ’ re astonished .
All these years fighting side by side , and they never knew that Mulan was a girl .
It ’ s like rabbits , Mulan explains .
If you trap a rabbit , you can tell whether @ @ @ @ @ @ @ But if you just see a rabbit sitting in a field , you ’ ll never know its sex .
And on that enigmatic note , the poem ends .
Because the ballad is so simple and elegant , we can see exactly what elements are important to the story at this early stage .
The ballad cares that Mulan is a strong and brave warrior , but it doesn ’ t care enough about her acumen as a soldier to spend time enumerating her deeds .
It ’ s interested in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ gender binaries .
Her transformation into a soldier — buying a horse and a saddle and a bridle and a whip — takes up half a stanza .
When she puts on her old clothes , the process gets a full stanza of its own .
And what the poem is deeply , deeply invested in is the idea that all of this exciting , potentially transgressive boundary crossing is justified , because Mulan is only doing it for her father .
She ’ s not really breaking imperial China ’ s strict @ @ @ @ @ @ @ she ’ s obeying the most important rule of all : filial piety .
And once she ’ s completed her tour in the army and saved her father , she goes back to her old life of traditional femininity without a qualm .
Mulan is following a particular understanding of virtue , and it can seem counterintuitive to Western audiences .
That ’ s just not how the European tradition teaches readers to think about cross-dressing warrior women , argues Lan Dong in her survey Mulan ’ s Legend and Legacy in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ While some European amazons or military maids dressed as men to pursue power , individual liberty , true love or happiness , ” Dong writes , “ the Chinese heroine steps out of the family quarter to fulfill her duty as a daughter , wife , or mother in particular circumstances.
” But in the Chinese literary tradition , these two conditions are what allow Mulan to be transgressive and a beloved icon at the same time .
She breaks rules when it ’ s the only way to reassert the importance of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ she ’ s finished following her highest duty , she returns happily to the gendered status quo .
“ I am embarrassed that I just have returned from weapons and war , not good enough to be a match for you ” Dong describes the legend of Mulan as a palimpsest , a story that keeps shifting and reforming over time but always bears the traces of its original forms .
It began as “ The Ballad of Mulan , ” and then out of that ballad ’ s legacy came a literary @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the millennium and a half since the sixth-century ballad was first recorded , Mulan has been the star of plays , of prose epics , of silent movies and children ’ s picture books and operas and Communist propaganda films .
And all of them focus heavily on Mulan ’ s extreme virtue as the justification for her exciting and transgressive cross-dressing .
Sometimes Mulan ’ s virtue takes the form of her deep commitment to traditional femininity .
In Xu Wei ’ s 16th-century play Female Mulan Joins the Army Taking Her @ @ @ @ @ @ @ bound feet , and when she unbinds them to fill her warrior ’ s shoes , she worries that her beauty will be ruined .
“ I will still get married after I come back , ” she frets .
“ What will I do then ?
” After she returns successfully from the wars , her parents inform her that they ’ ve found her a husband , and Mulan enters happily into an arranged marriage .
“ I have long heard that you are highly respected in the world of letters @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ I am embarrassed that I just have returned from weapons and war , not good enough to be a match for you.
” In many versions of the story , Mulan ’ s virginity is what makes her pure enough to withstand the potential corruption of cross-dressing .
In Chu Renhu ’ s 17th-century Historical Romance of the Sui and Tang Dynasties , Mulan must choose between loyalty to the emperor and her commitment to chastity after the emperor summons her to be his consort .
Unwilling to sacrifice one virtue for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ father ’ s grave .
As China entered the 20th century , Mulan became a powerful figure of political propaganda .
During and after the Sino-Japanese war , films and operas about Mulan showed her fighting off a Japanese invasion .
During the Cultural Revolution , female members of the Red Guard donned male uniforms in a nod to Mulan ’ s legacy , and the Mulan opera Who Says Women Are Not as Good as Men made the argument for female equality in China .
In 1976 , Maxine Hong Kingston ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ made Mulan a recognizable name in the West .
She would go on to star in American children ’ s picture books and folklore collections for decades .
And then , in 1998 , Mulan became a Disney princess .
And America began in earnest to put its stamp on one of China ’ s most iconic heroines .
“ She is a Western lass who grew up eating bread and butter ” As Dong reports , China had a lukewarm reaction to Disney ’ s animated Mulan .
It made only $ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , about one-sixth of the revenue Disney had been hoping for .
And while some commenters gave it points for effort , commending the film ’ s “ sincere effort in understanding Chinese culture , ” nearly everyone agreed that Disney ’ s Mulan was a creature of America .
“ She is a Western lass who grew up eating bread and butter , ” said one popular magazine article , although it also admitted that this new Mulan was “ lovable.
” Some filmgoers dubbed the movie Foreign Mulan .
Much of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the idea that 1998 Mulan has entirely different motivations from the traditional Chinese Mulan .
She goes to war to save her dad , sure — but she also goes because she ’ s a tomboy who rejects traditional femininity .
The 1998 Mulan follows classic ’ 90s Not Like Other Girls pop feminism rules , and as such she believes in individuality and standing apart from the status quo .
“ Maybe I didn ’ t go for my father , ” she muses .
“ Maybe what I really wanted was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , so when I looked in the mirror , I ’ d see someone worthwhile.
” Those values don ’ t mesh with the structure of the classic Mulan story .
That 16th-century Mulan who blushingly assured a stranger that she didn ’ t deserve to marry him would never have failed a matchmaker ’ s made-up marriage test the way Disney ’ s does , and 1998 Mulan would never have fretted over the idea of her feet getting bigger the way 16th-century Mulan did .
1998 Mulan sings a whole song @ @ @ @ @ @ @ pass for a perfect bride or a perfect daughter , ” but the traditional Chinese Mulan only worked in the first place because she was both a perfect bride and a perfect daughter .
The classic Mulan is unthreatening because she returns home to her old life as a good daughter at the end of the poem , but 1998 Mulan is so revolutionary that she single-handedly changes the entire empire ’ s opinion of women .
None of this should suggest that 1998 Mulan is a bastion of progressivism .
Mulan ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ possible in Disney ’ s 1998 movie because the writers rejiggered the story structure to give her deception greater stakes .
In Disney ’ s animated take , Chinese gender roles are so strict that Mulan ’ s cross-dressing is a capital crime , and we know early on that if her secret is revealed , she ’ ll pay with her life .
In contrast , the classic version of the story has Mulan ’ s army buddies react to the big reveal at the end with a bemused shrug : Mulan @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Who knew !
And then Mulan says the thing about rabbits .
Gender barriers are more porous and more fluid in this much older Chinese version of the story than they are in the 1998 Westernized version .
And while Disney heavily marketed the 1998 Mulan as a butt-kicking pop feminist heroine of girl power , its filmmakers held on for dear life to part of the traditional story structure that keeps Mulan ’ s gender-bending ways from ever getting too threatening .
At the end of the animated Disney movie , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ written since that sixth-century ballad , Mulan goes back home to her family to resume her life as a daughter , and she picks up a respectable husband for herself .
Her days of rule-breaking are behind her .
Now it ’ s time for her to devote herself to the task she failed at in the beginning of the movie and land a husband .
In the end , Mulan hasn ’ t broken the rules of femininity that really matter in Disney ’ s gender coding .
She followed the most @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
In 2020 , is it possible for Mulan to be truly subversive ?
Disney ’ s 2020 Mulan nods to its earliest predecessor within its first 15 minutes .
When we meet Mulan as an adult for the first time , she ’ s chasing two rabbits .
She thinks they ’ re a boy and a girl , she tells her family later , but — echoing the closing couplet of the sixth-century poem — “ it ’ s hard to tell when they run that fast.
” This Mulan also @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s “ I want ” song , “ Reflection.
” That ’ s more or less the course this movie is trying to chart : a middle path that nods to the legacy of both the 1998 animated Western version and more traditional Chinese versions of the story .
In 2020 as in 1998 , Disney ’ s Mulan is a tomboy who disgracefully fails her matchmaker ’ s marriage test , and in this version , too , Mulan ’ s deception is a capital crime .
But this new version @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Mulan ’ s highest motivator is still filial piety .
When she asks the emperor whom she just saved to send her home and the court gasps in shock , the emperor informs the watching crowd that “ devotion to family is an essential virtue.
” And when he presents Mulan with a ceremonial sword in recognition of her great deeds , it ’ s engraved with a list of virtues : the army ’ s cardinal three virtues of bravery , truth , and loyalty — and now , following Mulan ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Moreover , while the 1998 Mulan ’ s sex was revealed against her will , and all of her army buddies immediately turned against her , in 2020 ’ s version , Mulan makes the decision to reveal her true identity to her commander in service of the virtue of truth .
She ’ s briefly punished by being exiled from the army .
But when she returns to the commander with a warning that the emperor is in danger , her friends , more or less in the spirit of “ The @ @ @ @ @ @ @ her .
In the end , the battalion rides to the emperor ’ s defense with Mulan openly in the lead , dressed as a woman .
Gender roles here are not exactly as porous as they are in the original ballad .
But they are certainly less stringently defended than they were in 1998 .
The new film also gives Mulan a foil , a fellow unruly warrior woman named Xian Lang , who fights against the Chinese with the villainous Roran army .
Xian Lang was , we learn , once @ @ @ @ @ @ @ wanted to use her supernatural strength and acumen for the highest of purposes .
But she was exiled from her own country , and now she serves the Rorans so that when they come to power , they will pass some of their strength along to her .
Unlike Mulan , Xian Lang ’ s strength is threatening , and so it ’ s been blunted by the uber-masculine Roran-leader Böri Khan , who sneers that Xian Lang is a “ curbed dog.
” Xian Lang ostensibly exists to show us the dangers @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the patriarchy .
Mulan , too , might be rejected by her country , and she , too , might be forced to work for those who fear and sneer at a woman ’ s power .
But it ’ s hard to avoid a sense of a good woman/bad woman binary with this pairing .
The notion seems to be that what makes Mulan good is that she wields her power in favor of a good man ( the emperor ) , and what makes Xian Lang bad is that she wields @ @ @ @ @ @ @ The idea of a woman wielding her power on her own , for herself , doesn ’ t seem to exist in the landscape of this movie .
Still , there ’ s a moment in the live-action Mulan that is genuinely new to the story , and maybe even subversive .
It comes at the film ’ s conclusion , after Mulan has returned home to her family and received her father ’ s blessing for running away with his sword and armor .
Her commander follows her into her home village @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s accommodation , and begs her to reconsider her decision to return home .
Won ’ t Mulan , he asks , become a member of the emperor ’ s personal guard and continue to fight for China ?
Mulan ’ s eyes widen , and she turns her gaze up to a phoenix — the mythical bird that has become her guardian and her totem throughout the film — spinning lazy circles overhead .
Then the screen fades to black , and we leave Mulan there , on the precipice of answering @ @ @ @ @ @ @ from its first moment : Is it possible to tell a version of Mulan that doesn ’ t end with the woman warrior renouncing her sword to become a dutiful daughter and wife again ?
Is it possible — finally , and at least 1,500 years after her story was first written down — for Mulan ’ s assault against the gender binary to begin to stick ?
This Mulan doesn ’ t have any answers available for that question .
But at least it bothers to ask at all .
Help keep @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Vox each month to understand what ’ s happening in the news , from the coronavirus crisis to a racial reckoning to what is , quite possibly , the most consequential presidential election of our lifetimes .
Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment : to empower you through understanding .
But our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources — particularly during a pandemic and an economic downturn .
Even when the economy and the news advertising market recovers , your support will be a critical @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and helping everyone make sense of an increasingly chaotic world .
Contribute today from as little as $ 3 .

“There have been many tales of the great warrior Mulan,” says Mulan’s father in voice over as Disney’s live-action take on Mulan opens. “But ancestors, this one is mine.”
It’s true, there are a lot of Mulans out there. The story of Mulan, a young Chinese woman who disguises herself as a man and joins the army to save her father’s life, has been told over and over again for the past 1,500 years at least. It’s both beloved and iconic, and Mulan, who is as virtuous as she is strong and brave, is an essential heroine. And every time we retell her story, we have to make certain that she is still virtuous — whatever virtue means for the time and place where we’re telling it.
From the very first Mulan story in the sixth century, every time Mulan seems to be breaking the rules in a rebellious middle finger to the status quo, she’s actually following higher and more important rules. And that’s what keeps her transgression against gender boundaries from being too threatening to existing power structures. In the end, Mulan’s virtue might mean that her rebellion stops being a rebellion at all.
The first recorded version of Mulan dates back to the sixth century. It’s short, and it ends with some thoughts about rabbits.
“The Ballad of Mulan” first appeared sometime between the fourth and sixth centuries AD, and it is astonishingly streamlined. It’s a folk song, and it reads like one: just over 300 lines of something to be sung and memorized and passed from person to person. It’s through this ballad that Mulan took her place as an enduring heroine of Chinese culture, and it contains everything we need to know about what made her such an icon.
The ballad begins with Mulan at her loom, weaving. But she’s sad and preoccupied, and her sighing overwhelms the sound of the loom. Mulan’s elderly father is being called away to war, and he has no son to go in his place. So Mulan makes up her mind that she’ll go instead. She buys a horse and rides off to war.
The ballad has no details of what exactly happened during Mulan’s time in the army; we just know that she was away for 10 or 12 years, and that she fought valiantly and distinguished herself. When Mulan returns to the imperial court, the emperor offers her prizes and promotions, but Mulan asks only for a steed — in some translations a horse, in others a donkey — so that she can go back home to her family.
Upon arriving at home, Mulan takes off her soldier’s uniform and dresses in her old clothes, putting up her hair and applying makeup to her face. Then she goes outside to meet her old war buddies, and they’re astonished. All these years fighting side by side, and they never knew that Mulan was a girl.
It’s like rabbits, Mulan explains. If you trap a rabbit, you can tell whether it’s male or female. But if you just see a rabbit sitting in a field, you’ll never know its sex. And on that enigmatic note, the poem ends.
Because the ballad is so simple and elegant, we can see exactly what elements are important to the story at this early stage. The ballad cares that Mulan is a strong and brave warrior, but it doesn’t care enough about her acumen as a soldier to spend time enumerating her deeds. It’s interested in the time she spends crossing the barrier between gender binaries. Her transformation into a soldier — buying a horse and a saddle and a bridle and a whip — takes up half a stanza. When she puts on her old clothes, the process gets a full stanza of its own.
And what the poem is deeply, deeply invested in is the idea that all of this exciting, potentially transgressive boundary crossing is justified, because Mulan is only doing it for her father. She’s not really breaking imperial China’s strict gender rules when she crossdresses, because she’s obeying the most important rule of all: filial piety. And once she’s completed her tour in the army and saved her father, she goes back to her old life of traditional femininity without a qualm.
Mulan is following a particular understanding of virtue, and it can seem counterintuitive to Western audiences. That’s just not how the European tradition teaches readers to think about cross-dressing warrior women, argues Lan Dong in her survey Mulan’s Legend and Legacy in China and the United States. “While some European amazons or military maids dressed as men to pursue power, individual liberty, true love or happiness,” Dong writes, “the Chinese heroine steps out of the family quarter to fulfill her duty as a daughter, wife, or mother in particular circumstances.”
But in the Chinese literary tradition, these two conditions are what allow Mulan to be transgressive and a beloved icon at the same time. She breaks rules when it’s the only way to reassert the importance of filial piety. And as soon as she’s finished following her highest duty, she returns happily to the gendered status quo.
“I am embarrassed that I just have returned from weapons and war, not good enough to be a match for you”
Dong describes the legend of Mulan as a palimpsest, a story that keeps shifting and reforming over time but always bears the traces of its original forms. It began as “The Ballad of Mulan,” and then out of that ballad’s legacy came a literary tradition of Chinese Mulan stories.
Over the millennium and a half since the sixth-century ballad was first recorded, Mulan has been the star of plays, of prose epics, of silent movies and children’s picture books and operas and Communist propaganda films. And all of them focus heavily on Mulan’s extreme virtue as the justification for her exciting and transgressive cross-dressing.
Sometimes Mulan’s virtue takes the form of her deep commitment to traditional femininity. In Xu Wei’s 16th-century play Female Mulan Joins the Army Taking Her Father’s Place, Mulan has bound feet, and when she unbinds them to fill her warrior’s shoes, she worries that her beauty will be ruined. “I will still get married after I come back,” she frets. “What will I do then?”
After she returns successfully from the wars, her parents inform her that they’ve found her a husband, and Mulan enters happily into an arranged marriage. “I have long heard that you are highly respected in the world of letters,” she tells her bridegroom. “I am embarrassed that I just have returned from weapons and war, not good enough to be a match for you.”
In many versions of the story, Mulan’s virginity is what makes her pure enough to withstand the potential corruption of cross-dressing. In Chu Renhu’s 17th-century Historical Romance of the Sui and Tang Dynasties, Mulan must choose between loyalty to the emperor and her commitment to chastity after the emperor summons her to be his consort. Unwilling to sacrifice one virtue for another, she kills herself over her father’s grave.
As China entered the 20th century, Mulan became a powerful figure of political propaganda. During and after the Sino-Japanese war, films and operas about Mulan showed her fighting off a Japanese invasion. During the Cultural Revolution, female members of the Red Guard donned male uniforms in a nod to Mulan’s legacy, and the Mulan opera Who Says Women Are Not as Good as Men made the argument for female equality in China.
In 1976, Maxine Hong Kingston’s seminal Asian American memoir Woman Warrior made Mulan a recognizable name in the West. She would go on to star in American children’s picture books and folklore collections for decades.
And then, in 1998, Mulan became a Disney princess. And America began in earnest to put its stamp on one of China’s most iconic heroines.
“She is a Western lass who grew up eating bread and butter”
As Dong reports, China had a lukewarm reaction to Disney’s animated Mulan. It made only $1.3 million at the Chinese box office, about one-sixth of the revenue Disney had been hoping for. And while some commenters gave it points for effort, commending the film’s “sincere effort in understanding Chinese culture,” nearly everyone agreed that Disney’s Mulan was a creature of America. “She is a Western lass who grew up eating bread and butter,” said one popular magazine article, although it also admitted that this new Mulan was “lovable.” Some filmgoers dubbed the movie Foreign Mulan.
Much of the distaste for the movie stems from the idea that 1998 Mulan has entirely different motivations from the traditional Chinese Mulan. She goes to war to save her dad, sure — but she also goes because she’s a tomboy who rejects traditional femininity.
The 1998 Mulan follows classic ’90s Not Like Other Girls pop feminism rules, and as such she believes in individuality and standing apart from the status quo. “Maybe I didn’t go for my father,” she muses. “Maybe what I really wanted was to prove I could do things right, so when I looked in the mirror, I’d see someone worthwhile.” Those values don’t mesh with the structure of the classic Mulan story.
That 16th-century Mulan who blushingly assured a stranger that she didn’t deserve to marry him would never have failed a matchmaker’s made-up marriage test the way Disney’s does, and 1998 Mulan would never have fretted over the idea of her feet getting bigger the way 16th-century Mulan did. 1998 Mulan sings a whole song about how she’ll “never pass for a perfect bride or a perfect daughter,” but the traditional Chinese Mulan only worked in the first place because she was both a perfect bride and a perfect daughter. The classic Mulan is unthreatening because she returns home to her old life as a good daughter at the end of the poem, but 1998 Mulan is so revolutionary that she single-handedly changes the entire empire’s opinion of women.
None of this should suggest that 1998 Mulan is a bastion of progressivism. Mulan’s revolution of Chinese opinion only becomes possible in Disney’s 1998 movie because the writers rejiggered the story structure to give her deception greater stakes. In Disney’s animated take, Chinese gender roles are so strict that Mulan’s cross-dressing is a capital crime, and we know early on that if her secret is revealed, she’ll pay with her life. In contrast, the classic version of the story has Mulan’s army buddies react to the big reveal at the end with a bemused shrug: Mulan’s a girl! they say. Who knew! And then Mulan says the thing about rabbits. Gender barriers are more porous and more fluid in this much older Chinese version of the story than they are in the 1998 Westernized version.
And while Disney heavily marketed the 1998 Mulan as a butt-kicking pop feminist heroine of girl power, its filmmakers held on for dear life to part of the traditional story structure that keeps Mulan’s gender-bending ways from ever getting too threatening. At the end of the animated Disney movie, as in nearly every version of Mulan written since that sixth-century ballad, Mulan goes back home to her family to resume her life as a daughter, and she picks up a respectable husband for herself. Her days of rule-breaking are behind her. Now it’s time for her to devote herself to the task she failed at in the beginning of the movie and land a husband.
In the end, Mulan hasn’t broken the rules of femininity that really matter in Disney’s gender coding. She followed the most important one: She got her man.
In 2020, is it possible for Mulan to be truly subversive?
Disney’s 2020 Mulan nods to its earliest predecessor within its first 15 minutes. When we meet Mulan as an adult for the first time, she’s chasing two rabbits. She thinks they’re a boy and a girl, she tells her family later, but — echoing the closing couplet of the sixth-century poem — “it’s hard to tell when they run that fast.”
This Mulan also features instrumental reprises of the 1998 film’s “I want” song, “Reflection.” That’s more or less the course this movie is trying to chart: a middle path that nods to the legacy of both the 1998 animated Western version and more traditional Chinese versions of the story.
In 2020 as in 1998, Disney’s Mulan is a tomboy who disgracefully fails her matchmaker’s marriage test, and in this version, too, Mulan’s deception is a capital crime. But this new version is careful to make it clear that Mulan’s highest motivator is still filial piety. When she asks the emperor whom she just saved to send her home and the court gasps in shock, the emperor informs the watching crowd that “devotion to family is an essential virtue.” And when he presents Mulan with a ceremonial sword in recognition of her great deeds, it’s engraved with a list of virtues: the army’s cardinal three virtues of bravery, truth, and loyalty — and now, following Mulan’s example, devotion to family.
Moreover, while the 1998 Mulan’s sex was revealed against her will, and all of her army buddies immediately turned against her, in 2020’s version, Mulan makes the decision to reveal her true identity to her commander in service of the virtue of truth. She’s briefly punished by being exiled from the army. But when she returns to the commander with a warning that the emperor is in danger, her friends, more or less in the spirit of “The Ballad of Mulan,” rally around her. In the end, the battalion rides to the emperor’s defense with Mulan openly in the lead, dressed as a woman.
Gender roles here are not exactly as porous as they are in the original ballad. But they are certainly less stringently defended than they were in 1998.
The new film also gives Mulan a foil, a fellow unruly warrior woman named Xian Lang, who fights against the Chinese with the villainous Roran army. Xian Lang was, we learn, once like Mulan, a young idealist who wanted to use her supernatural strength and acumen for the highest of purposes. But she was exiled from her own country, and now she serves the Rorans so that when they come to power, they will pass some of their strength along to her. Unlike Mulan, Xian Lang’s strength is threatening, and so it’s been blunted by the uber-masculine Roran-leader Böri Khan, who sneers that Xian Lang is a “curbed dog.”
Xian Lang ostensibly exists to show us the dangers Mulan faces from the dark side of the patriarchy. Mulan, too, might be rejected by her country, and she, too, might be forced to work for those who fear and sneer at a woman’s power. But it’s hard to avoid a sense of a good woman/bad woman binary with this pairing. The notion seems to be that what makes Mulan good is that she wields her power in favor of a good man (the emperor), and what makes Xian Lang bad is that she wields her power for a bad one. The idea of a woman wielding her power on her own, for herself, doesn’t seem to exist in the landscape of this movie.
Still, there’s a moment in the live-action Mulan that is genuinely new to the story, and maybe even subversive. It comes at the film’s conclusion, after Mulan has returned home to her family and received her father’s blessing for running away with his sword and armor. Her commander follows her into her home village, presents her with the emperor’s accommodation, and begs her to reconsider her decision to return home. Won’t Mulan, he asks, become a member of the emperor’s personal guard and continue to fight for China?
Mulan’s eyes widen, and she turns her gaze up to a phoenix — the mythical bird that has become her guardian and her totem throughout the film — spinning lazy circles overhead. Then the screen fades to black, and we leave Mulan there, on the precipice of answering the question that has haunted her legend from its first moment: Is it possible to tell a version of Mulan that doesn’t end with the woman warrior renouncing her sword to become a dutiful daughter and wife again?
Is it possible — finally, and at least 1,500 years after her story was first written down — for Mulan’s assault against the gender binary to begin to stick?
This Mulan doesn’t have any answers available for that question. But at least it bothers to ask at all.


vox--2020-09-05--Colleges are making last-minute changes as coronavirus cases spike. That’s tough for students.

Coronavirus cases are flooding the campuses of US colleges and universities , leading to last-minute instructional changes — and sudden disciplinary actions — that have caused difficulties for students and their families .
This week at Northeastern University in Boston , 11 students were dismissed from their program without tuition reimbursement for violating Covid-19 social distancing policies , and the Ohio State University suspended 225 students before classes even began for similar infractions .
There have been more than 50,000 confirmed cases on college campuses since the pandemic began , according to the New York Times , a number that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ That ’ s prompted a number of colleges , like the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill , to cancel in-person classes after students had already paid tuition .
And as Vox ’ s Terry Nguyen has reported , rising case numbers have also left many students scrambling to find housing off-campus — or transportation back home .
The increasing infections have left college towns such as Auburn , Alabama , and Ames , Iowa , hot spots for coronavirus outbreaks .
More than 1,000 cases have been discovered at University of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 1,200 at University of South Carolina , nearly 1,400 at the University of Alabama , 540 at the University of Kansas , 752 at Texas A & M , and 962 at University of Iowa .
University administrators are all handling the surges differently .
Currently , around 20 percent of colleges are either primarily or fully in-person , according to a tracker from Davidson College ’ s College Crisis Initiative .
Around a third are either fully or primarily offering courses online .
Overall , Irwin Redlener , director of the Pandemic @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , described the current higher education situation to Politico as “ national chaos.
” Some schools , like Boston University and Colby College , are checking students daily for coronavirus symptoms .
Others are setting up quarantine dorms and creating screening stations throughout campus .
But many aren ’ t conducting robust testing of students — in fact , the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention didn ’ t recommend testing when some colleges opened for summer instruction .
And when things go awry , it ’ s often students who take the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a rash of suspensions at schools including Syracuse University , the University of Miami , and the State University of New York , among others .
Some argue this is an ineffective strategy given the patchwork of policies employed by universities around the country largely fails to protect students .
Julia Marcus , a professor at Harvard Medical School , and Jessica Gold , a professor at Washington University in St. Louis , wrote in the Atlantic this summer : Rising cases — and sudden policy changes — have left students in a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ case numbers and be forced to move instruction online should have been obvious , a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill sophomore named Suzy told Nguyen .
“ From the moment we stepped foot on campus , I knew we weren ’ t going to be there for a long time , ” Suzy said .
“ Parents knew .
I overheard someone joking that they ’ ll see their kids in two weeks.
” And this has largely been the case , leaving students frustrated at sudden changes , and upset @ @ @ @ @ @ @ class in person after paying tuition or making travel plans .
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill held in-person classes for only one week before shutting down on August 17 .
Jarrah Faye , a sophomore at UNC and a residential adviser in a first-year dorm , told Nguyen she had to both find new housing for herself and support freshmen moving out while keeping up with online classes .
“ Where am I going to live ?
I have so many questions and so little time to think about what I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I ’ m going to go , ” Faye told Nguyen .
“ Had this been done better , low-income students like myself wouldn ’ t have been put in this position of wondering whether our housing will be refunded , or if we ’ ll have enough money to get food if dining halls close down.
” With cases continuing to climb , colleges are now faced with a new problem : Whether to send students back home to communities where they could continue to spread the virus , as Dr. Anthony @ @ @ @ @ @ @ risk keeping them on campuses to wait out a pandemic .
It ’ s another piece of the complexities of education in 2020 — but one that many see as a problem that could have been avoided .
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Coronavirus cases are flooding the campuses of US colleges and universities, leading to last-minute instructional changes — and sudden disciplinary actions — that have caused difficulties for students and their families.
This week at Northeastern University in Boston, 11 students were dismissed from their program without tuition reimbursement for violating Covid-19 social distancing policies, and the Ohio State University suspended 225 students before classes even began for similar infractions.
There have been more than 50,000 confirmed cases on college campuses since the pandemic began, according to the New York Times, a number that has increased dramatically in recent weeks. That’s prompted a number of colleges, like the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, to cancel in-person classes after students had already paid tuition. And as Vox’s Terry Nguyen has reported, rising case numbers have also left many students scrambling to find housing off-campus or transportation back home.
The increasing infections have left college towns such as Auburn, Alabama, and Ames, Iowa, hot spots for coronavirus outbreaks. More than 1,000 cases have been discovered at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, nearly 1,200 at University of South Carolina, nearly 1,400 at the University of Alabama, 540 at the University of Kansas, 752 at Texas A&M, and 962 at University of Iowa.
University administrators are all handling the surges differently. Currently, around 20 percent of colleges are either primarily or fully in-person, according to a tracker from Davidson College’s College Crisis Initiative. Around a third are either fully or primarily offering courses online. Overall, Irwin Redlener, director of the Pandemic Resource and Response Initiative at Columbia University, described the current higher education situation to Politico as “national chaos.”
Some schools, like Boston University and Colby College, are checking students daily for coronavirus symptoms. Others are setting up quarantine dorms and creating screening stations throughout campus. But many aren’t conducting robust testing of students — in fact, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention didn’t recommend testing when some colleges opened for summer instruction.
And when things go awry, it’s often students who take the blame for the failure, leading to a rash of suspensions at schools including Syracuse University, the University of Miami, and the State University of New York, among others.
Some argue this is an ineffective strategy given that the patchwork of policies employed by universities around the country largely fails to protect students. Julia Marcus, a professor at Harvard Medical School, and Jessica Gold, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis, wrote in the Atlantic this summer:
Relying on the self-control of young adults, rather than deploying the public-health infrastructure needed to control a disease that spreads easily among people who live, eat, study, and socialize together, is not a safe reopening strategy—and yelling at students for their dangerous behavior won’t help either.
Rising cases and sudden policy changes have left students in a difficult place
That schools would see high case numbers and be forced to move instruction online should have been obvious, a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill sophomore named Suzy told Nguyen.
“From the moment we stepped foot on campus, I knew we weren’t going to be there for a long time,” Suzy said. “Parents knew. I overheard someone joking that they’ll see their kids in two weeks.”
And this has largely been the case, leaving students frustrated at sudden changes, and upset to learn they would not be attending class in person after paying tuition or making travel plans.
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill held in-person classes for only one week before shutting down on August 17. Jarrah Faye, a sophomore at UNC and a residential adviser in a first-year dorm, told Nguyen she had to both find new housing for herself and support freshmen moving out while keeping up with online classes.
“Where am I going to live? I have so many questions and so little time to think about what I’m going to do and where I’m going to go,” Faye told Nguyen. “Had this been done better, low-income students like myself wouldn’t have been put in this position of wondering whether our housing will be refunded, or if we’ll have enough money to get food if dining halls close down.”
With cases continuing to climb, colleges are now faced with a new problem: Whether to send students back home to communities where they could continue to spread the virus, as Dr. Anthony Fauci has warned against doing, or risk keeping them on campuses to wait out a pandemic. It’s another piece of the complexities of education in 2020 — but one that many see as a problem that could have been avoided.