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Schools are using restorative justice to resolve conflicts. Does it work?

July 31, 2023 Paul Costello1 Uncategorized
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Maryland lawmakers prioritized the alternative disciplinary practice four years ago, but the rollout has been complicated

By Caralee AdamsJuly 15, 2023 at 6:00 a.m. EDT

The skirmish last fall began on a Montgomery County school bus.

Someone — no one is sure who — tossed a water bottle from the back of the bus, smacking a sixth-grader sitting near the front. The next day, the victim retaliated by throwing a container of milk to the back, dousing a seventh-grader.F

The two girls, who live near each other, were headed for a fight — and possibly suspension. But their parents called the school for help, and one of the Montgomery County Public Schools’ newly appointed instructional specialists in restorative justice got to work.

With permission from the families, Floyd Branch III, the specialist, brought the girls together for lunch and a “restorative circle” to defuse the tension. Neither of the girls really wanted to target the other, but they were embarrassed by the incident and by students laughing at them on the bus.

“They were able to talk it out and say they were sorry,” Branch said. “Children can’t learn if they don’t understand what the mistake was, or when there’s no conversation.” The process did not turn the two into friends, he said, but they have been able to ride the bus together without any more fighting.

This situation, and its resolution, is a good example of restorative justice at work, say supporters of this approach to discipline and community building. Instead of focusing on punishment, restorative practices invite those in conflict to talk through the issue so they can understand the harm caused, take responsibility and find ways to move forward.

Elements of restorative justice have long been used in Indigenous cultures, and, since the 1970s, as part of alternative sentencing programs in the criminal justice system. The practice spread to schools in the 1990s and accelerated after 2014 as an alternative to “zero-tolerance” suspension and expulsion policies for misbehavior. Those consequences, experts say, are fraught with problems. Exclusionary discipline doesn’t serve as a deterrent and often derails a student’s educational path: Black students, boys, and students with disabilities are more likely to be suspended and expelled than other students, and school administrators often discipline Black students more severely and frequently than White students who engage in the same behaviors.

In 2019, Maryland legislators passed a law requiring districts to incorporate restorative approaches in their discipline policies. Montgomery County, which is the largest school district in Maryland, with more than 160,000 students, has leaned into the practice, adding staff whose job is to help to build and repair relationships among all members of a school community — students, teachers, parents and administrators. There are still suspensions for serious offenses, according to the system’s code of conduct, but restorative justice is among the discipline that schools can use.

Shauna-Kay Jorandby, who oversees school engagement, behavioral health and academics for the district, said that based on the results of a recent survey, students are looking for the support that restorative justice promises.

“We know that our kids need help communicating, talking and understanding each other,” Jorandby said. “We know that they need help with conflict, whether it’s at school or at home. We know they need help with the stressors in their life.”

Opinion: Don’t fret over antisemitism in schools. We have restorative circles.

But the school system’s efforts are coming at a time when there’s been a call among some for stronger penalties for acting out in schools, in response to higher misbehavior rates after students returned from pandemic shutdowns. In some districts, police, who were banned from campuses in 2020, have been asked to return.

In Montgomery County, some parents, teachers and students have pushed back against restorative justice, saying harsher discipline is sometimes necessary to hold students accountable. Others question the way restorative circles are conducted, noting that the circles are often led by staff from the district’s central office, who the students don’t know or trust. They want to see more training, consistency and transparency about the process.

The new approach to student behavior is leading to a “free for all” in the schools; kids are getting away with hurting one another, said Ricky Ribeiro, a parent and PTA vice president at John F. Kennedy High School in Silver Spring. He wants the district to explain why the restorative approach is better than what’s been used in the past and provide evidence.

“Implementing this system is not going to be easy. It’s unclear if it will be successful, if we even know what success looks like, and if we have enough resources to make it successful,” Ribeiro said. “And yet, MCPS is going all-in with the kitchen sink on it, and I don’t know [if] that’s a good idea.”

The district’s restorative justice work was put to the test earlier this year after an antisemitic incident roiled a high school.

The school system is coping with a spate of hate, bias and racist incidents — an average of one per day, which is three times higher than previous years, Superintendent Monifa McKnight told the community in an address April 27. Last December, two students on the school debate team at Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda allegedly made antisemitic comments about their Jewish teammates on an off-campus trip.

The offenders were disciplined by the school, and the district brought in restorative justice specialists to hold sessions with students. Rachel Barold, who was a ninth-grader at the time of the incident, said she felt the process didn’t work in that situation and let the offenders off too easily.

“Restorative justice circles are great for maybe bullying or other offenses at MCPS, but acts of hate against a group of people based on the ethnicity or religion — that is not the place,” said Barold, who is Jewish. “Restorative justice is a lot about forgiving who did it. And having to sit in the same room with them. It’s really re-traumatizing victims.”

Restorative justice sessions are voluntary, though Barold said she and other members of the debate team felt pressure to participate. Going into the restorative circles, students didn’t know the district specialists leading the conversation or what to expect, she said. For example, some students had prepared remarks saved on their cellphones, but were told cellphones weren’t allowed. Afterward, school administrators acknowledged they had made mistakes. Barold hopes the district will use the feedback to modify a process that she felt favored the offenders over the victims.

The school’s principal, Robert Dodd, did not respond to three interview requests. Whitman’s school paper, The Black and White, reported that the students received a month-long suspension from the debate team.

Jorandby said restorative conversations don’t take away the hurt, but they can be a first step to healing, even with hate and bias. The district has developed a consent and feedback form for formal restorative conferences emphasizing that the process is voluntary and gives parents the opportunity to decline consent for their child to participate.

OPINION: Restorative justice isn’t a panacea, but it can promote better relationships among students

The official consent form is among the ways district officials say they are trying to make the restorative justice program more robust. Last school year, the district hired six restorative justice specialists in the district’s central office, bringing the total to nine. Each specialist is assigned to serve a cluster of schools. The district is also paying a stipend to a staff member in each school to act as a restorative justice coach. All staff are required to take a short restorative justice training session and administrators have been asked to consider restorative approaches when crafting new goals for school climate, culture and student well-being in school improvement plans.

“It’s a work in progress,” said Damon Monteleone, an associate superintendent in the office of school support and well-being for Montgomery County schools. The district’s own data shows this: Nearly three-quarters of school leaders who participated in a self-evaluation released in May said they were either early in their development of restorative justice processes or had no processes in place at all. Only 3 percent believed they had a “mature” process in place.

That is not surprising. With the pandemic and its ensuing disruption of in-person learning, 2022-23 was the first normal school year for restorative justice in the schools since the 2019 state policy change, Monteleone said. The district itself is still learning what works, but it’s not ignoring criticism, he said.

It can take time for restorative justice to take hold in a school’s culture — as much as three to five years, say experts — and, as with any major shift, the process can be controversial. But research consistently shows the approach has a positive effect on students. A recent report by Sean Darling-Hammond, assistant professor of health and education at UCLA, indicates that restorative practices improve middle school students’ academic achievement, while reducing suspension rates and disparities, misbehavior, substance abuse and student mental health challenges.

Opinion: When students stumble, colleges should turn to restorative justice before expulsion

Such work also needs money. The Maryland law, while well-intentioned, isn’t adequately funded, said David Hornbeck, a former Maryland state schools superintendent. In March, he launched Restorative Schools Maryland, a nonprofit that advocates for restorative justice policies and funding.

Rather than a few people from a district’s central office being called to put out fires, the work of restorative practices requires full-time staff in the schools, Hornbeck said.

“We face a challenge in people thinking that restorative practice is a kind of touchy-feely, namby-pamby, let-the-kids-off-the-hook thing — and that couldn’t be further from truth,” he said. Hornbeck said he also wants schools to track suspensions, teacher turnover, and student absenteeism to make sure their restorative justice practices actually work.

For this approach to work, supporters say, it will require investment on the front end. In Montgomery County schools, officials say about 80 percent of the restorative justice work is preventive (holding “community circles,” promoting self-care, teaching conflict resolution strategies) and 20 percent is responsive (repair practices and restorative conferences).

Daphne McKay, who retired at the end of the year as a restorative justice coach at Kingsview Middle School in Germantown, said the circles give students space to process experiences and create a sense of belonging.

“The more people we have in our lives supporting us, the better,” she said. “Restorative justice is all about sitting down and hearing one another’s perspectives and trying to find a way to come together and understand one another.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/07/15/restorative-justice-montgomery-county-schools/

This report about restorative justice in the classroom was produced by The Hechinger Report [hechingerreport.org], a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

2024 won’t be a Trump-Biden replay. You can thank Gen Z for that.

July 31, 2023 Paul Costello1 Uncategorized
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By Celinda Lake and Mac Heller Washington Post July 20 2023

Celinda Lake, a Democratic Party strategist, was one of two lead pollsters for Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign. Mac Heller is a documentary film producer, most recently of “Rigged: The Voter Suppression Playbook.”

It’s easy to envision the 2024 presidential election becoming the third straight contest in which a veteran Democrat goes up against Donald Trump. Once again, the Democrat wins the popular vote but swing states are tighter. Could go either way — and has, right?

But things are very different this time, and here’s why: The candidates might not be changing — but the electorate has.

Every year, about 4 million Americans turn 18 and gain the right to vote. In the eight years between the 2016 and 2024 elections, that’s 32 million new eligible voters.

Also every year, 2½ million older Americans die. So in the same eight years, that’s as many as 20 million fewer older voters.

Which means that between Trump’s election in 2016 and the 2024 election, the number of Gen Z (born in the late 1990s and early 2010s) voters will have advanced by a net 52 million against older people. That’s about 20 percent of the total 2020 eligible electorate of 258 million Americans.

And unlike previous generations, Gen Z votes. Comparing the four federal elections since 2015 (when the first members of Gen Z turned 18) with the preceding nine (1998 to 2014), average turnout by young voters (defined here as voters under 30) in the Trump and post-Trump years has been 25 percent higher than that of older generations at the same age before Trump — 8 percent higher in presidential years and a whopping 46 percent higher in midterms.

Similarly, though not as drastic, we have seen a 7 percent increase in voter registration among under-30 voters since Gen Z joined the electorate. In midterm elections, under-30s have seen a 20 percent increase in their share of the electorate, on average, since Trump and Gen Z entered the game.

Yet Trump is not the deciding factor for these voters. When pollsters ask why, Gen Z voters say their motivation is not a party or candidate. It is, instead, strong passion on one or more issues — a much more policy-driven approach than the more partisan voting behavior of their elders.

That policy-first approach, combined with the issues they care most about, have led young people in recent years to vote more frequently for Democrats and progressive policies than prior generations did when of similar age — as recent elections in Kansas, Michigan and Wisconsin have shown.

In last August’s Kansas abortion referendum, for example, women under 30 turned out at a rate of 41 percent and helped win the contest. A similar Michigan abortion referendum brought youth midterm turnout to 49 percent — and 69 percent of voters younger than 30 voted to put abortion rights protections in the state constitution compared with just 52 percent of voters 30 and older. Michigan voters elected Democratic majorities in both state houses for the first time in years, and reelected their Democratic governor, attorney general and secretary of state.

While American voters historically have tended somewhat to become more conservative as they age, no one should expect these voting patterns to change drastically. About 48 percent of Gen Z voters identify as a person of color, while the boomers they’re replacing in the electorate are 72 percent White. Gen Z voters are on track to be the most educated group in our history, and the majority of college graduates are now female. Because voting participation correlates positively with education, expect women to speak with a bigger voice in our coming elections. Gen Z voters are much more likely to cite gender fluidity as a value, and they list racism among their greatest concerns. Further, they are the least religious generation in our history. No wonder there’s discussion in some parts of the GOP about raising the voting age to 25, and among some Democrats about lowering it to 16!

There are lessons — and warnings — here for both parties. For Republicans, the message is obvious: Listen to the voices of this soon-to-be-dominant group of voters as you formulate your policies on climate, abortion, guns, health care, inclusion and everything else. Unlike some older voters, they are listening to what you say — and to how you say it. Change your language and style from the unmitigated male id of “Never Back Down” and “Where Woke Goes to Die” to words of community, stewardship, sharing and collaboration. That’s the new patriotism, and young voters believe that approach will solve problems more effectively than what they’ve seen over the past two decades.

There are stark messages for Democrats, too. Meet young voters where they are: on social media, not cable news. Make your messages short, funny and somehow sarcastic yet authentic and earnest at the same time. Your focus should be issues first, issues second, candidates third and party identity never.

A final word of warning: Both parties should worry about young voters embracing third-party candidates. Past elections show that Gen Z voters shop for candidates longer and respond favorably to new faces and issue-oriented candidates. They like combining their activism with their voting and don’t feel bound by party loyalty. And they can’t remember Ross Perot, Ralph Nader — or even Jill Stein.

We suspect both campaigns know most or all of what we have written here. Habit might prevent them from acting on it, but they have these numbers. In one of life’s great ironies, the group that doesn’t know it is young voters. They think of themselves as ignored, powerless and marginalized in favor of big money and shouting boomers. But over the next year, they’ll figure it out. Gen Z will tire of waiting for Washington to unite to solve problems, will grab the national microphone and will decide the 2024 presidential race.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/07/19/gen-z-voters-2024/

So your historical quote turned out to be fake

July 31, 2023 Paul Costello1 Uncategorized
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Analysis by Gillian Brockell Washington Post July 20th 2023 

Former police chief turned yoga instructor turned Jan. 6 defendant Alan Hostetter had a quote to share with the court during closing arguments in his federal trial, for which he defended himself.

“When governments fear the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny,” Hostetter said, attributing it to Thomas Jefferson. This, he said, explained his bursting into the Capitol with weapons on that fateful day in 2021.

One problem: There’s no evidence Jefferson said that, according to the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which maintains the third president’s Monticello estate.

Misquoting Einstein, Jefferson and Gandhi: Study finds members of Congress can’t resist

Hostetter’s views on the 2020 election might be on the far right, but when it comes to historical misquotes, he’s got plenty of bipartisan company. Presidents, Congress members, candidates — many are guilty of putting spurious words into the mouths of figures they admire.

Take, for example, rapper and former presidential candidate Kanye West — now known as Ye. In 2018, he told TMZ that “400 years of slavery” was a “choice,” later citing Harriet Tubman as saying, “I freed a thousand slaves. I could have freed a thousand more if only they knew they were slaves.” There’s no evidence Tubman said this, according to Tubman scholar Kate Clifford Larson. It appears to have emerged in the late 20th century “when white and black conservatives frequently used it to scold young black men,” she wrote in Vox.

It isn’t just the “College Dropout” rapper who has invoked the fake Tubman quote; Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), an Ivy Leaguer, tweeted it in 2016.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), former president Donald Trump and former secretary of state Hillary Clinton have at least one thing in common: All have misattributed his quote — “First, they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” Indian leader Mohandas K. Gandhi is not known to have said this, despite myriad social media memesclaiming such. It appears to have originated with Nicholas Klein, a union organizer speaking in 1918: “First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you,” he said. “And that is what is going to happen to the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America.”

Not every popular American Founder quote is fake, though many have more complicated sourcing than is often acknowledged.

Benjamin Franklin’s “A republic, if you can keep it” was invoked countless times in 2019 as members of the House debated impeachment charges against Trump. As the legend goes, while leaving Independence Hall after the Constitutional Convention in 1787, someone asked Franklin, “What have we got? A republic or a monarchy?” to which Franklin said, “A republic, if you can keep it.”

The quote doesn’t appear in the public record until 1906, but historians have found contemporaneous notes and letters indicating Franklin may have actually said it, though in a different setting — in the home of society lady Elizabeth Powel.

Did Ben Franklin really say ‘A republic if you can keep it?’

And, of course, there’s Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty or give me death,” supposedly shouted at the Second Virginia Convention in 1775. Little mentioned is that Henry was probably quoting from the play “Cato, a Tragedy,” which was popular among Americans in the 1700s. In Act II, Cato says, “It is not now a time to talk of aught/But chains or conquest, liberty or death.”

According to the Journal of the American Revolution, Nathan Hale’s famous “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country” was probably a paraphrase of Cato’s line, “How beautiful is death when earned by virtue?/Who would not be that youth? What pity is it/That we can die but once to serve our country!”

Jefferson is a frequent victim of spurious attribution. Other quotes for which there’s no evidence he actually said?

“Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.”

“That government is best which governs least.”

“The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.”

Jefferson’s powerful last public letter reminds us what Independence Day is all about

In any case, the false Jefferson quote cited by Hostetter does not appear to have worked as intended. He was convicted Thursday of conspiring to obstruct and obstructing an official proceeding, and trespassing and engaging in disorderly conduct with a dangerous weapon.

Just remember, folks: The definition of insanity is not doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. It’s falsely attributing that definition to Albert Einstein without double-checking to see if it’s true.21CommentsGift this articleGift Article

By Gillian BrockellGillian Brockell is a staff writer for The Washington Post’s history blog, Retropolis. She has been at The Post since 2013 and previously worked as a video editor.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2023/07/14/quotes-thomas-jefferson-january-6/

The future isn’t what it used to be

July 31, 2023 Paul Costello1 Uncategorized
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By Ramesh Ponnuru Contributing columnistWashington Post July 25th 2023

American politics is awash in nostalgia. It’s bipartisan, and it starts at the top. All of our recent presidents have trafficked in it. Donald Trump’s inaugural address in 2017 portrayed a nation that had fallen from its peak because “a small group in our nation’s capital” had plundered the country for years while “struggling families” were left with “little to celebrate.” President Biden says our economy has been lagging behind other countries, at least until he took office, and that misguided policies have been impoverishing the middle class for 40 years.

Americans agree that the present doesn’t measure up to the way things used to be. In April, the Pew Research Center reported that 58 percent of respondents to its survey said life for people like them is worse than it was 50 years ago.

There’s some debate over what accounts for this sentiment. One school of thought holds that economic trends amply justify the public’s sense of decline. According to this view, wages have stagnated for decades, making it harder for young people to marry and to start families. But the best evidence contradicts this story. The Congressional Budget Office reports that households in the middle of the pack had income growth of 26 percent from 1990 to 2019 — and of 55 percent if you count taxes and government benefits.

Those impressed by such statistics wonder why we are so ungrateful. Maybe it’s the negative bias of the news media, they speculate, or the natural wistfulness of an aging society. Or maybe our unhappiness is not mostly a matter of economics. Social conservatives point to declining rates of church attendance and marriage as causes of lamentation, although they cannot pine for the higher divorce and abortion rates we had 50 years ago.P

I have a tentative theory about the hold the “good old days” seem to have on us. Yes, we have more material possessions, more wealth, more access to medicine and more educational opportunities for our children than we did 50 years ago. But living standards were rising more rapidly back then. And that steady upward movement is a large part of what we miss — even those of us with no personal memory of it.

This idea of progress was not merely material. The civil rights revolution was making our society more just. Most Americans trusted the government to solve problems and work in the public interest. During the 1960s and 1970s, that confidence cratered. (It partly recovered in the 1980s and early 1990s and then resumed its downward trajectory.) Even if that confidence was misplaced, as it certainly was in the 1960s, it’s understandable that we would regret losing it.

Social changes have continued, often using the civil rights struggle as a model. But even as most Americans see same-sex marriage as a social advance, the conviction that the arc of history bends toward justice, as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. liked to say, has faltered.

The sheer size — and current age — of the baby boom generation is surely responsible for some of today’s nostalgia. But not all of it. When its members were kids, the country really did look forward to what lay ahead more than we do now. The problem isn’t that we’re idealizing the past. It’s that the future’s not what it used to be.

If I’m right, then convincing Americans that we were poorer than we remember in the old days will not suffice to change our mood. We will have to find a way to recapture yesterday’s way of looking at tomorrow.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/07/24/nostalgia-is-about-losing-confidence-in-future/

MyScore can change the story

July 27, 2023 Paul Costello1 Uncategorized
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THEORY OF CHANGE
MyScore is built on a narrative theory of change.

The outcome we aim for in our work is a new story, a new frame of meaning, rather than just a new set of skills. Or put in another way, if we insist on skills, the new set of skills we impart to our students and that comes from the mentoring is interpretive skills, a new applied hermeneutic that better honors their human experience.


We want to invite our students to see and hear their lives differently. Instead of seeing their struggle as signaling failure or always being a victim, oppressed by trauma, disadvantage and despair, they come to see themselves inhabiting the story of a courageous and successful life learner. (SLL) That is not to underestimate their circumstances or the serious disadvantages they face, but to help create a belief that adversity does not have to define them. That is the point of the intervention that Project CHANGE is instigating through its members. Why is that important? Because life, as William James writes, can change if we can change our attitude to it. He wrote, “The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes.”

STORY AS OUTCOME- NOT IMPACT
As a result of the mentoring, advocacy, and continuing emotional support that a member gives a struggling student over a year, that student will grow into to a truer, deeper, and surer self-awareness (“I believe in me”.) That includes their attitude to their emerging identity, their own ability to learn, to get along with others, and to cope with the challenges that life inevitably throws at them, and all of us.   Challenges might impact this population more significantly because our clients, through no fault of their own, often start from behind. As a result of our service, the students will have a better chance of shaping a larger future for themselves. It is less a goal to be achieved than a life orientation to be adopted, or a direction that we encourage the student to move toward, to replace a deficit mindset with a growth mindset. In the final analysis, the best evaluator of that change is the students themselves. They must be able to claim it to live it. What matters is not what others know about themselves from outside, but what they know and live on the inside. That is how they will show up and shine through.

This element is critical to human flourishing — yet missing from the news

July 12, 2023 Paul Costello1 Uncategorized
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Hope: The 3 Things needed to Grow and Thrive | SCA

By Amanda Ripley Contributing columnist Washington Post March 30 2023

At a cocktail party in a crowded Washington living room some years ago, I met a magazine editor who was working on a high-profile new book. It would transport the reader into the future, he told me, describing in vivid, terrifying prose all the catastrophes that might happen because of climate change: unbreathable air, dying oceans, hunger, drowning.

Would it offer people any hope? I asked.

“It’s not my job to give people hope,” he said, sounding vaguely disgusted. I got the sense that hope was for the weak. And that by asking my question, I was weak, too.

A year later, his book ended up being a bestseller. So, I figured, maybe he was right. Maybe hope is not our job. But then, I couldn’t help but wonder, whose job was it?

Last summer, I wrote a piece in this newspaper admitting that I have been selectively avoiding contact with the news, even though I’m a journalist myself. Traditional news coverage, I had slowly come to realize, was missing half the story, distorting my view of reality. It frequently overlooked and underplayed storylines and dimensions that humans need to thrive in the modern world — with the three most notable elements being hope, agency and dignity.

Amanda Ripley: I stopped reading the news. Is the problem me — or the product?

That column sparked an unexpected response. I heard from thousands of readers caught in the same struggle — wanting to be informed about the world but not bludgeoned into fatalism. Many of you reported that you had taken matters into your own hands. One man, after listening to devastating stories on the radio, does his own Google searches to find examples of people trying to solve the very same problems. Then he shares the links he has found with his friends and family on Facebook, basically doing a job reporters don’t want to do.

Others urged me to check out alternative sources they had found, including the Progress Network newsletter, which curates stories of human cooperation and ingenuity, and the 1440 daily briefing, which attempts to strip bias from the news. Still others said they have sought refuge in sports, hyperlocal news, Wordle and, for one reader, medieval history.

This year, with your help, I’d like to revisit each of the missing elements, starting with the most controversial of the three.

The word hope sounds gauzy and fey, like rainbows and sunsets. It feels like a gateway drug to delusion and denial. “I don’t want your hope,” climate activist Greta Thunberg said at the World Economic Forum in 2019. “I want you to panic.”

But rainbows and sunsets are explicable phenomena, the scattering of sunlight in the distance, and it turns out that hope is, too. For more than 30 years, scientists have been researching hope and deconstructing its building blocks. And it’s surprisingly tangible. “It’s important to say what hope is not,” Rebecca Solnit wrote in her book “Hope in the Dark.” “It is not the belief that everything was, is, or will be fine.”

So what is it? Hope is more like a muscle than an emotion. It’s a cognitive skill, one that helps people reject the status quo and visualize a better way. If it were an equation, it would look something like: hope = goals + road map + willpower. “Hope is the belief that your future can be brighter and better than your past and that you actually have a role to play in making it better,” according to Casey Gwinn and Chan Hellman in their book, “Hope Rising.”

Decades of research have now proved that hope, defined this way, can be reliably measured and taught. Using 12 questions, called the Hope Scale — a version of which you can take yourself here — more than 2,000 studies have demonstrated that people with stronger hope skills perform better in school, sports and work. They manage illness, pain and injury better and score higher on assessments of happiness, purpose and self-esteem. Among victims of domestic violence, child abuse and other forms of trauma, hope appears to be one of the most effective antidotes yet studied.

Still, there is resistance to hope, even among those who know it best. For a long time, Hellman, a psychologist by training, did not think giving people hope was his job, either. At conferences, he would wave people off when they asked him how to build their capacity for hope. “I don’t do hope. I study it,” he’d tell them.

I recognize myself in this story. As a journalist, trying to look smart in story meetings, it always felt safer to remain skeptical. It was easier to pitch stories about buffoonery than about progress. It’s a strange trick of the mind, especially because it’s the news media’s relentless negativity that has led so many people to give up on institutions — or on journalism. Cynicism feels protective, even when it’s not.

Martin Baron: We want objective judges and doctors. Why not journalists too?

About a decade ago, Hellman decided to stop sitting on the sidelines — partly because of his own life story. All through high school, he had been homeless, always on the precipice of catastrophe. And specific people had helped him imagine another life and feel as if he was capable of getting there (remember: goals + road map + willpower). So he decided he had an obligation not just to study hope but to teach it.

So far, he and his colleagues at the Hope Research Center at the University of Oklahoma at Tulsa have trained more than 22,000 government employees in Oklahoma, California and Washington to cultivate hope on purpose — not just among individuals but across entire systems, in welfare programs, school districts and prisons, among other places. They have found that it reduces burnout and improves outcomes for workers and those they serve. “It literally is strategic planning,” Hellman says. “Hope is the process. Well-being is the outcome.”

As it is, when journalists try to do hopeful stories, they often end up insulting our intelligence — with stories about small acts of kindness, often involving animals. There is no goal or road map.

But if this other, more muscular kind of hope is critical to human flourishing, then why can’t journalists make it part of their job? It would mean asking totally different questions, just as doggedly as ever: What are realistic goals, in the face of a wicked problem? What are some of the ways other communities have tried to get there? And how did they manage to press on, even when things didn’t go as planned?

What would it look like if careers were made (and prizes won) based on this kind of inquiry and storytelling? We might see fewer column inches just describing (over and over again) the alarming rise in depression among teens — and more stories such as this one by Anya Kamenetz, investigating a surprising remedy that has been shown to reduce psychological distress. When it comes to crime coverage, we might become as obsessed with declines as we are with spikes. Why are homicides down 31 percent in East St. Louis over the past four years, when they remain high in so many other places?

When it comes to climate change, there is hope, defined this way, at least, and there always was. Humans still have enormous control over what happens to our planet. In the past five years, we have cut expected warming almost in half. The world is on track to add as much renewable energy generation in the next five years as it did in the past 20, according to the International Energy Agency. There’s much more to be done, of course, but getting there requires rigorously reported stories that help us visualize a road map. Why not report out hope, the same way we report out dread?

I know it is difficult for some in my field to make this shift. The more hopeless news you consume, the harder it is to see hope in the wild — and no one consumes more news than journalists. But the research also shows that it is possible. “Hope is malleable,” says Matthew Gallagher, a clinical psychologist who studies hope at the University of Houston. “It’s not a static thing, like how tall you are. It can change.”

For journalists, hope is a defiant way of being in the world: ever on the lookout for what is but always alert to what might be.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/03/30/amanda-ripley-hope-news/


Hope is a virtue, not a feeling. And it’s practical, too.

July 12, 2023 Paul Costello1 Uncategorized
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By E.J. Dionne Jr. Columnist|Follow Washington Post July 11th 2023

Hope is summoned so often in speeches and sermons that invoking it invites the very cynicism and resignation it is meant to answer. The word can seem to be a crutch to get past some unpleasantness, a deus ex machina contrived to move humanity from a terrible here to a delightful there with no effort, discipline or commitment.

But hope is a demanding virtue, not a sunny disposition. It accepts reality, acknowledges obstacles and insists, as the bard of hope Barack Obama put it, “that something better awaits us if we have the courage to reach for it and to work for it and to fight for it.”

This aspiration became so central to Obama’s political life that the word itself came to be seen as partisan. Campaigning in the 2010 midterm elections, Sarah Palin, the GOP’s vice-presidential nominee two years earlier, coined a memorable dismissal: “How’s that hopey changey thing working out for ya?”

But hope, like faith and love, is not the possession of any party or politician. And here’s something else about hope: It’s practical.

Amanda Ripley: This element is critical to human flourishing — yet missing from the news

If hope isn’t exactly in the air these days, the work it does is on a lot of thoughtful minds. Two books published in the past year — one by an economist, the other by a theologically inclined humanities scholar — bring home why hope is central to policymaking and decent politics.

Carol Graham, my colleague at the Brookings Institution, has made the study of well-being her life’s work as an economist. Nodding to the reality that “The Power of Hope” reflects an unusual preoccupation within a discipline often referred to as “the dismal science,” Graham opens her first chapter with nice understatement: “Hope is a little-studied concept in economics.”

It shouldn’t be, she argues, because hope is relevant to so many of the outcomes economists seek, including upward mobility, a well-trained, dedicated workforce, better health and the economic growth that flows from all of them. Hope’s opposite, despair, is now an enormous, measurable problem.

“Despair in the United States today is a barrier to reviving our labor markets and productivity,” she writes. “It jeopardizes our well-being, longevity, families and communities.”P

To pick a simple example Graham discusses: Nurturing hope matters to the success of job training and education policies because “they will not be taken up if people do not have hope in their own futures.” That’s because hope is not just a belief “that things will be better in the future,” but also confidence in “the ability to do something about that future.”

The good news is that well-being issues are working their way into the public debate, reflected in Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy’s report on loneliness, isolation and lack of connection as a public health crisis. Murthy argued that the choices government makes in transit, parks, libraries, family leave and technology can all build social as well as physical infrastructure to foster community — and, yes, hope.

The choices we make about the structure of the economy matter, too. Graham cites the celebrated work of Anne Case and Angus Deaton on “deaths of despair” among working-class Americans from suicide, alcohol-related diseases and drug overdoses. The loss of hope typically followed the loss of well-paying jobs and the collapse of communities.

Deaths of despair, Case and Deaton found, were especially common among lower-income Whites. Black Americans, perhaps from their long experience overcoming discrimination and oppression, showed measurably higher rates of resiliency. But Graham notes that in recent years, suicide rates have been rising sharply among young Black Americans, and deaths from drug overdoses among Black men have shot up, too. Restoring hope is a moral and policy imperative across racial lines.

Henry Olsen: I found hope for democracy in an unexpected place

It’s also an imperative in our politics, as Wake Forest University scholar Michael Lamb argues in “A Commonwealth of Hope,” a fascinating revisionist view of the political thought of St. Augustine. Contrary to a popular perception of Augustine as an otherworldly thinker who accents “darkness and pessimism,” Lamb sketches a persuasive portrait of a thinker who “encourages a realistic hope for a better form of community not only in heaven but on earth.”

Lamb’s Augustine grasps “both the limits and possibilities of politics” — wisdom demands we always keep both in mind — and he is thus “an especially valuable, if unlikely, ally in our contemporary moment.”

Like Graham in the policy sphere, Lamb highlights the high cost of despair in politics, which he argues “can license apathy or fatalism, encouraging citizens to withdraw from politics rather than stretch toward difficult political goods.”

His valuable warning: “When despair becomes a habit — a vice — it can further entrench the social and political problems that prompted pessimism in the first place.”

Democracy cannot work if citizens are demoralized and demobilized by such despair. You don’t have to be a sucker for the hopey changey thing to see why we need a rendezvous with hope — in our individual lives and in our common life, too.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/07/09/politics-hope-carol-graham-michael-lamb/

How Supreme Court decisions are activating a generation of young voters

July 11, 2023 Paul Costello1 Uncategorized
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By Tamia FowlkesJuly 9, 2023 at 7:00 a.m. EDT




Aaron Satyanarayana was disheartened by the recent Supreme Court ruling against affirmative action. His girlfriend, Maxine Ewing, is worried about the fallout from the court’s decision to block President Biden’s plan to forgive student loan debt.

And Cam Kuhn was livid that a majority of the justices sided with a website designer who refused services to LGBTQ+ people on religious grounds.


Cam Kuhn said he remembered when the Supreme Court guaranteed a national right to same-sex marriage in 2015. Now, “I want to believe that the Supreme Court is not political, but it’s very hard,” he said. “I think what everybody is feeling right now is we’re tired of the government telling us how we should live our lives.” (Tom Brenner for The Washington Post)

The young voters plan to make their objections known at the ballot box next year, viewing the court’s actions as out of step with the issues and values important to them and their peers.

For many voters under 35 years of age, especially those on the left, the Supreme Court has become a political issue in the same way that climate change, gun violence and immigration have over the course of the past two decades, some political scientists and organizers have said.

Conversations with more than a dozen young voters from around the country who recently visited Washington for the Fourth of July suggest a sense of frustration, even resignation for some, but also a renewed understanding that their votes could impact which justices sit on the federal bench.

Democrats and liberals have viewed the high court as an institution that historically protects the rights of marginalized groups. But Republican politicians and activists on the right have remade the court: President Donald Trump, backed by a GOP Senate, appointed three justices to create a conservative majority.

Over the past five years, trust in the Supreme Court to “do the right thing” all or most of the time has decreased by 10 percentage points among 18- to 29-year-olds, according to a poll released by the Institute of Politics at Harvard Kennedy School.

The court’s recent rulings, along with last year’s decision striking down the right to abortion established in 1973’s Roe v. Wade, could prompt more young people to be active in next year’s presidential and congressional elections, some observers predict.

“They are [angry] because government continues to give them the short end of the stick, they’re going to turn out and vote. And in this case, it could not be more clear that there’s two sides and the contrast could not be more stark,” said Antonio Arellano, a spokesman for NextGen America, a liberal advocacy group and political action committee.

Some, like the 24-year-old Satyanarayana, say this moment calls for more than just casting a ballot.

“It’s not the time to kind of isolate or dissociate from reality or the work that has to be done in political and social movements,” said Satyanarayana, who recently moved to D.C. from New York. “And as somebody who has been so averse towards door-knocking and canvassing my entire life, these three decisions and Dobbs are shifting my mind-set.” Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization was the case in which the court ruled that there was no constitutional right to abortion.

Ewing, 24, who is from New York, generally shies from political debates but had much to say about the court’s decision to block Biden’s plan to forgive up to $20,000 in student-loan debt for borrowers.

“They are setting up a generation and future generations for failure, and it’s going to impact everyone,” Ewing said as she and Satyanarayana stood on a shaded stretch of grass on the National Mall. “What’s going to happen when none of us can buy houses? What’s going to happen when none of us can buy anything?”


Aaron Satyanarayana is motivated by the Supreme Court’s recent ruling against affirmative action, while Maxine Ewing is concerned about what happens after the court’s decision to block President Biden’s plan to forgive student loan debt. (Tom Brenner for The Washington Post)

Young voters, who overwhelmingly supported Democratic candidates in last year’s midterms, were credited with helping to stop an anticipated Republican wave in Congress. Democrats held onto the Senate, and while the GOP won the House, it did so with a slim majority. A Washington Post analysis of census turnout data indicates that 26 percent of voters under 30 turned out in 2022, which was down from 2018, but still notably higher than any midterm election between 2002 and 2014.

And in the spring, college-aged voters in Wisconsin headed to the polls in droves to elect Janet Protasiewicz, flipping the state Supreme Court’s majority from conservative to liberal, in a bid to protect abortion rights there.

The state’s young voter turnout led the nation in November’s midterm elections, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

Still, turnout among young voters continues to lag behind older voters. Rick Hasen, UCLA professor of law and political science and director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project, said organizers should seek to expand the number of young people on the voter rolls.

“The kind of political action that should be targeted at young people, the very first thing to think about even more than getting people to show up at the polls is getting them to register in the first place,” Hasen said.

Supreme Court was drawn into last four elections, and likely again in 2024

The court also ruled that a Colorado graphic artist could refuse to create wedding websites for same-sex couples, citing her religious objections.

Kuhn, 34, identifies as a member of the LGBTQ+ community. He said he vividly remembers the day in 2015 that the court guaranteed same-sex couples the right to marry in Obergefell v. Hodges, citing itas the moment he started to pay attention to the Supreme Court.

“I felt so supported by my country,” he said.

Now, almost a decade later, Kuhn struggles with the Supreme Court’s “swing in the other direction.”

“I want to believe that the Supreme Court is not political, but it’s very hard,” Kuhn said. “I think what everybody is feeling right now is we’re tired of the government telling us how we should live our lives. Let us have our freedoms, let us love who we want to love, let us go to college where we want to go to college, let people have their reproductive rights.”

Kuhn, who lives in Little Rock, said he hopes to join organizing efforts for LGBTQ+ issues and student loan forgiveness ahead of next year’s election. Although Kuhn would like to see newer figures in the Democratic Party run for president, such as Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer or California Gov. Gavin Newsom, he plans to support Biden in 2024.

“He is the right person, especially with us potentially facing Trump coming back,” Kuhn added.

Christian Blanks has always described himself as conservative. But as he and his mother, Bari, paused in front of the Supreme Court, they expressed their doubts about the Republican Party’s ability to capture their vote.


Christian Blanks always described himself as conservative, but recent anti-trans legislation in his home state of Louisiana has left him “more on the left.” However, he added, “if it’s just really primarily going to be Joe Biden versus one of the radical right-leaning candidates running, I’m not even gonna bother, because where I vote … it’s always conservative folks that win.” (Tom Brenner for The Washington Post)

Blanks’ sister is transgender and has spent most of her life under attack in their home state of Louisiana. Amid sweeping changes to laws governing diversity and inclusion programs in schools and access to abortion, Louisiana legislators made repeated efforts this year to ban gender-affirming medical care for young transgender people and sought to enact a bill barring discussions about gender and sexuality in schools.

“I used to be kind of a conservative first, but then after all of these, you know, kind of Bible-pumping, senators and candidates have come about, I just, you know, I’ve definitely become more on the left,” Christian said.

Bari thinks the Supreme Court, which for decades was seen as protecting the rights of marginalized groups, is now “influenced by career politicians.”

“Aside from the fact that the country is more polarized than it’s ever been, I think the right-leaning GOP and the infringement on the right to privacy and personal rights is deplorable,” she said.

But Christian added that Democrats would need to put forward better options to earn his vote in 2024. “If it’s just really primarily going to be Joe Biden versus one of the radical right-leaning candidates running, I’m not even going to bother, because where I vote in Louisiana, it’s always conservative folks that win.”

Top GOP lawyer decries ease of campus voting in private pitch to RNC

According to an April survey by the Marist Poll, 50 percent of 18 to 29-year-old voters disapprove of the job that Biden is doing. The poll also found that 61 percent of young people don’t want Trump to return to the Oval Office.

Voters under 30, who backed Biden by a wide margin according to exit polls conducted by Edison Research and AP VoteCast, were hopeful that he would make good on his promise to protect abortion access, cancel student loan debt and defend LGBTQ+ rights. But after the recent Supreme Court decisions, many now consider voting for Biden to be a matter of survival.

“I felt like after Roe v. Wade, it just went downhill from there. And I feel like that was the starting point of like, really seeing how bad things could get,” said 21-year-old Faye Ipaye, a student at Bowie State University. “I feel like young people don’t have a lot of trust in them. … We’re going to like have to just pick the lesser of the two evils.”


Temi Dosunmu, Angela Adoyo and Faye Ipaye outside the Capitol. (Tom Brenner for The Washington Post)

Organizations like NextGen America are trying to make sure that disillusionment doesn’t turn into disengagement. It aims to increase national voter turnout on college campuses and among voters 18 to 29 years old, using social media to deliver messages about voting resources, as well as Supreme Court rulings and their impact.

Although young voters have consistently leaned left, organizers warn that Democrats shouldn’t take that support for granted.

Clarissa Unger, chief executive of the Students Learn Students Vote Coalition, a nonpartisan voter education network working to increase turnout among college students, said Generation Z voters don’t bind themselves to parties but respond to candidates who demonstrate an understanding of their lived experiences.

“Both parties have an opportunity to make a direct appeal to young people and to bring them into the fold, and I think it’s to either party’s detriment to not do so,” Unger added.

A study by Tufts University’s Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement estimated that 8.3 million youth became eligible voters in 2022, with 46 percent representing communities of color.If mobilized, this diverse group brings with it a set of policy priorities shaped by identity and informed by national struggles like the covid-19 pandemic and the social justice movement that grew from the police killing of George Floyd, said Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg, the center’s Newhouse director.

According to data from the Education Data Initiative, over 15 million millennials have student loan debt — more than any other generation — carrying on average a balance of $33,173 per borrower. Many are waiting, with fingers crossed, for Biden’s loan forgiveness agenda to succeed.


Estefani Marchena, shown with boyfriend Chase Campos-Tapia, said when she took out loans to attend the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, she didn’t think ahead to how much it might cost to pay them back. “I’m just like, I’ll figure it out later when I graduate,” she said. (Tom Brenner for The Washington Post)

For borrowers like Estefani Marchena, a 21-year-old senior at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, said when she took out the loans, she didn’t think ahead to how much it might cost to pay them back. “I have loans, but I’m just like, I’ll figure it out later when I graduate,” she said. Marchena said she never knew much about Biden’s loan forgiveness plan, and did not imagine a possibility in which it would happen. But now she thinks it could have been helped.

Marchena hopes to attend graduate school next year, pursuing a master’s degree in public health. She wants to make health-care resources more accessible for minorities and people with disabilities. “I think there’s still a lot of change that needs to be made,” she said.

In 2024, she is certain she will cast a ballot for Biden, along with her boyfriend, Chase Campos-Tapia. Marchena said she voted for Biden in 2020 because it was “the lesser of two evils.” In an ideal world, she said, her choice would have been Bernie Sanders. “You have to be smart. I think, slowly, you have to make change to get more Democratic people in office,” she said.
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By Tamia FowlkesTamia Fowlkes is a general assignment reporting intern at The Washington Post. She recently graduated from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. Before joining The Post, she worked at USA Today Network, “The Rachel Maddow Show” on MSNBC, WISC-3 TV News, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the Wisconsin State Journal and Isthmus. 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/07/09/supreme-court-decisions-young-voters-student-loan-forgiveness-lgbtq/

The photos of Frederick Douglass that helped him fight to end slavery

July 10, 2023 Paul Costello1 Uncategorized
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In a rare, salted-paper photograph, Frederick Douglass wears a sophisticated high collar, an elegant three-piece suit and a short salt-and-pepper Afro, coifed with a part down the middle of his scalp. Douglass, who would become one of the most photographed people of the 19th century and one of the country’s most powerful orators, appears in the faded photo with a righteous gaze, in a pose that the writer and activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton described as “majestic in his wrath.”

This photograph, taken in 1860 and unique in style among the dozens of images often seen of Douglass, is showcased in the exhibit “One Life: Frederick Douglass,” which opened last month at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery.

At 88, he is a historical rarity — the living son of a slave

The exhibit traces Douglass’s trajectory, in photographs, records and writings, from enslaved man to fugitive, fierce abolitionist and presidential adviser, highlighting how he carefully constructed his enduring image using every available medium of his time.


Douglass, seen around 1845. “He wanted to create a dialogue with his photograph,” curator John Stauffer said. (Onondaga Historical Association Museum & Research Center)

“Douglass, in the larger sense, cultivated an immensely powerful voice in different registers. One was as speaker, one was based on his photographs and prints, one was through his activism and one was through his writing,” said Smithsonian guest curator John Stauffer, a professor of English and African and African American Studies at Harvard University.

“He believed a photograph was an accurate representation of the figure,” Stauffer said. “He always dressed up for his photography, much like he did for his speeches. He wanted to create a dialogue with his photograph that he provided with his speeches. It was a form of representation he hoped would convince people to follow him in advocating for equality.”

Frederick Douglass had nothing but scorn for July Fourth

Douglass was born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey in 1818, on a Maryland plantation owned by Edward Lloyd V, a former governor of Maryland and U.S. senator. The Smithsonian exhibit includes the original leather-bound ledger containing the names of babies born on that planation. On the left displayed page, in black ink and large script, overseer Aaron Anthony wrote: “Frederick August son of Harriett Feby 1818.” No father was mentioned; some historians suspect it was Anthony.

In September 1838, Frederick Bailey escaped enslavement, changing his name to Frederick Douglass. A 19th-century flier in the exhibit depicts a painting of a young Frederick escaping barefoot — though in the real-life escape he wore shoes. The illustration is headlined: “The Fugitive’s Song,” which was composed and dedicated to Douglass. The caption reads: “Frederick Douglass, A Graduate from the ‘Peculiar Institution.’ For his fearless advocacy, signal ability and wonderful success in behalf of HIS BROTHERS Ind. BONDS. And to the FUGITIVES FROM SLAVERY in the UNITED STATES & CANADA.”

On Sept. 15, 1838, Frederick married Anna Murray, a free Black woman who had lived in Baltimore and helped him escape enslavement, financing his escape by selling a bed made of feathers. The couple went on to have five children together.


Douglass in a daguerreotype circa 1841, the year he was hired as a speaker for the American Anti-Slavery Society. (Collection of Greg French)

The Smithsonian exhibit, which runs through April, includes one of the first known photographs of Douglass, taken in 1841. The image, tucked inside a worn frame encased with a red silk lining, shows a young Douglass with his thick black curls piled high, his jaw square and an intense stare. It was captured a year after the first commercial daguerreotype studio opened in the country, the National Portrait Gallery says, when the exposure time for such a machine “could run up to 15 seconds.”

The searing photos that helped end child labor in America

Douglass was hired that year as a speaker for the American Anti-Slavery Society, moving with his young family to Lynn, Mass., near Boston. For the next 60 years, Douglass would make his mark on the world, becoming one of the most powerful voices against the cruel institution of chattel enslavement. He wrote hundreds of essays, a novela, three autobiographies and thousands of speeches.

“When he escaped from slavery, he dated his birth to the day he escaped from slavery,” Stauffer said. “So, he felt like, ‘I’m playing catch up. I have to make up for all these lost years.’ He was a workaholic. He read voraciously. He got caught up on this kind of canon of what any educated person needs to read. He was passionate about it.”


An oil painting of Douglass, circa 1845, when he published his first autobiography. (Mark Gulezian/National Portrait Gallery)

Douglass knew one of his greatest tools was public speaking. For those who could not attend his speeches, he published them in his newspaper or in pamphlets. William Lloyd Garrison, the editor of the Liberator newspaper, advertised and published Douglass’s 1845 autobiography, “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.”

Frederick Douglass delivered a Lincoln reality check at Emancipation Memorial unveiling

The autobiography was a hit, making Douglass so famous that he had to flee to Great Britain to avoid being enslaved again as a fugitive. Abolitionists helped buy his “freedom,” and Douglass returned to the states two years later, in 1847, as a free man. He moved to Rochester, N.Y., where he founded the North Star, an anti-slavery newspaper whose name referred to the light “that helped guide those escaping slavery to the North,” according to the Library of Congress. Douglass, in the initial issue, called it “the STAR OF HOPE.”

In 1855, Douglass published his second autobiography, “My Bondage and My Freedom: Part I. — Life as a Slave. Part II. — Life as a Freeman.” An original copy of that book, published during the period when violence had erupted between pro-slavery and anti-slavery factions vying for control of the new territory of Kansas, lies beneath a glass case in the Portrait Gallery.


John White Hurn took the most photographs of Douglass — and also helped him flee after the Harpers Ferry raid. (Collection of Greg French)

One of the most striking photos in the exhibit shows Douglass with a shock of white hair, growing like a painted line in his black Afro. The photograph was taken by John White Hurn, most likely on Jan. 14, 1862, according to curators. Douglass had given a speech at the National Hall in Philadelphia, located a block from Hurn’s studio.

Hurn, a telegraph operator who had helped Douglass flee again in 1859, after his abolitionist ally John Brown’s raid at Harpers Ferry, went on to photograph Douglass again in 1866 and 1873. Hurn took as many as nine photographs in all, the most of any Douglass photographers.

‘Unflinching’: The day John Brown was hanged for his raid on Harpers Ferry

After the Civil War began in 1861, Douglass wrote to President Abraham Lincoln advocating that he free all enslaved Black people in America and provide them with arms to fight against the Confederacy. The two met, at the White House, on several occasions.

The Smithsonian exhibit contains an original copy of a letter dated Aug. 29, 1864, in which Douglass asked the president to send a Black agent to conduct “squads of enslaved people northward.” Douglass demanded that the Union Army provide food and shelter for the Black freedmen. Lincoln listened. Days later, the Union army marched to victory in Atlanta.

Frederick Douglass needed to see Lincoln. Would the president meet with a former enslaved person?

“He said in his speeches this is a golden opportunity to destroy slavery and remake the United States as a true democracy,” Stauffer said. “He charged Lincoln: ‘End slavery right now. Free them and arm them. They know the South far better than anyone else.’ Had Lincoln and his administration heeded that advice, I actually think the war would have lasted far less than four years. Lincoln and his generals — some of them had been racist — realized the only way they could win this war was with the support of Blacks.”

Douglass wrote many of his powerful speeches at his home, Cedar Hill, in Southeast Washington, which he bought in 1877, defying laws that prohibited African Americans from buying property in the area. The home, now part of the Frederick Douglass National Historic Site, will reopen to the public Tuesday, the National Park Service announced, after closing in 2020 for the pandemic and renovations.

The reopening ceremony will include a dramatic performance of Douglass’s 1852 speech “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”


Douglass, in an engraving from 1883. (Jen Harris/National Portrait Gallery)

Stauffer said one of his objectives in collecting the photographs in one exhibit was to help people feel the weight of Douglass’s legacy.

“He was the preeminent writer and widely known in his day as the greatest orator in the 19th century,” Stauffer said. “It captures Douglass’s significance as a leader. He had an unmatched orator style. He was blessed with musicality; he had a musical voice. He could adjust the range. He was a wordsmith. He was dedicated to giving speeches that would keep audiences on their seats, wanting to follow every word.”

Frederick Douglass died Feb. 20, 1895, just hours after his public makeup with Susan B. Anthony

Douglass knew, he said, that “words are one of the most potent weapons one could have in trying to achieve equality and the true vision of democracy.”

By DeNeen L. BrownDeNeen L. Brown, who has been an award-winning staff writer in The Washington Post Metro, Magazine and Style sections, has also worked as the Canada bureau chief for The Washington Post. As a foreign correspondent, she wrote dispatches from Greenland, Haiti, Nunavut and an icebreaker in the Northwest Passage.  Twitter

https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2023/07/01/frederick-douglass-speech-smithsonian-national-portrait-gallery/

How the fight against LGBTQ+ books in Montgomery County became a national issue

July 10, 2023 Paul Costello1 Uncategorized
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By Nicole AsburyJuly 5, 2023 at 7:00 a.m. EDT

For the past few months, hundreds of Muslim and Ethiopian Orthodoxparents have called on Maryland’s largest school system to restore an opt-out provision for books that feature LGBTQ+ characters.

These new advocacy groups in Montgomery County say they prize inclusion. They align with the school system’s general diversity and equity efforts in their children’s schools and laud Superintendent Monifa B. McKnight for a speech she delivered against hate. They have pushed for underrepresented groups like themselves to be reflected in the school’s curriculum and accommodations for their religious holidays and practices.F

But these groups, which turned out more than 500 people at a rally last week in Rockville, diverge from progressives on this issue.

They say elementary school students should be able withdraw from lessons featuring books that can lead to conversations about sexual orientation and gender identity— topics they say should be handled by parents at home. Some parents describe the books as “sexual content” and point to “Pride Puppy,” a book for pre-K students that has a scavenger hunt that directs students to look for people like noted LGBTQ+ rights activist Marsha P. Johnson, who parents targeted for her occasional sex work, as well asitems like underwear and leather. Three families have also filed a lawsuit against the school system.

“None of us are anti-LGBT; none of us hold any hatred toward them. We recognize they have a different value system,” said Raef Haggag, a parent of a rising second grader in the school system and former computer science teacher. “We want to be able to introduce our children to these sensitive topics which are intertwined with our faith in a very sensitive way.”

A deep blue county officially raises its Pride flag for the first time

Montgomery County — a deep blue, culturally diverse suburb of D.C. — has long highlighted its inclusionary efforts. The books are a part of a supplemental curriculum introduced during the 2022-23 school year to diversify its English Language Arts curriculum. Students have repeatedly requested books and curriculum that represent LGBTQ+ identities over the years, according to four former and current student representatives on the county board of education.

The school system put an opt-out provision in place when the books were introduced, schools spokeswoman Jessica Baxter said. But that guidance shifted in March. Montgomery school officials say that Maryland law doesn’t allow students to withdraw from school lessons, except for a portion of the state’s health education curriculum on family life and human sexuality. Because the books are part of the English Language Arts curriculum, no exemptions are allowed. A spokesperson for the Maryland State Board of Education agreed with that analysis.

But the religious and conservative groups say the school system can still provide the allowance, because of a school policy that promises “feasible and reasonable accommodations” to religious beliefs and practices.

Pushback against the books and their lessons began publicly in January when Lindsey Smith — the chair of the Montgomery chapter of Moms for Liberty — spoke against them at a school board meeting,calling the books and their lessons “indoctrination, not education.” When the opt-out provision was revoked in March, she and other parents began hosting silent protests holdingsignsduring school board meetings and eventually speaking on the topic during each meeting.

The school system’s decision also led to some complaints from Muslim parents, who contacted the Maryland office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Montgomery County Muslim Council — both advocacy groups. The two entities began organizing parents to speak at school board meetings, and as opposition grew, outsiders joined the fight, with national conservative groups and media following the issue.ADVERTISING

For Smith, the additional support was a relief.

“For us at Moms for Liberty, we’ve only had 50 to 100 people there,” said Smith, a mother of three in the school system who lives in Damascus. “So it was encouraging to know we were not alone, to be honest.”

But as the movement has grown,there have been divisions. The groups that have organized Muslim parents in the county have distanced themselves from and saythey have no affiliation with Moms for Liberty,a controversial national parental rights advocacy group.

“They’re supporting the Muslim community. They’re supporting parents because they also want the right to restore opt-out,” said Zainab Chaudry, the director of the Maryland Office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. “But their ideology, their views, their positions are antithetical to what our communities stand for.”

The Southern Poverty Law Center recently categorized Moms for Liberty as an extremist group. Smith has deferred comments about that designation to the national organizers behind Moms for Liberty.

Some Montgomery parents want to opt out of new books featuring LGBTQ characters

As the fight in Montgomery has gained national attention, Chaudry and leaders of other local groups have tried to keep the focus on the county’s parents and students and have denounced other groups trying to make their efforts a political cause.

“The message can be undone immediately and it can be completely switched,” said Hisham Garti, the outreach director for the Montgomery County Muslim Council.

Some individuals hope the issue will galvanize more Muslims in the political arena. Sameerah Munshi, 22, a part of Coalition of Virtue, explained that the group was co-founded by a Howard County resident with the Montgomery book issue in mind, but plans to expand to other issues and give Muslim Americans a platform to use their faith as a tool in politics.

Despite the opposition, there is support for the school system’s policy and use of the books in its curriculum from the teacher’s union, some school board members and students. Some parents have similarly formed their own group, called the Coalition for Inclusive Schools and Communities, and launched their own petition to show support.

The school system reinforced its policies in an email to parents last week. “There is no content instruction on gender identity and sexual orientation in elementary school. The books include a diversified representation of people. Inclusive books support a student’s ability to empathize, connect, and collaborate with diverse peers and encourage respect for all,” the message said. Italso repeatedthat no opt-out would be provided to families and giving advance notice before the books are read “will not be possible.”

The incoming student representative on the school board, Sami Saeed, delivered remarks at a May board meeting that spoke of how there is “overwhelming support” for the books and the elimination of an exemption. After he spoke, he said a few parents approached him after and were surprised by his position as the first known Arab student member on the board. “A lot of [the parents] expressed to me that when I went against what they were thinking, it was almost like a shock,” Saeed, a rising senior in the school system, said.

But after hearing from more parents on both sides of the issue, he said he would be supportive of notifying them in advance of the books being read so they can talk about it with their kids at home, but not allow them to skip the lessons.

By Nicole Asbury Nicole Asbury is a local reporter for The Washington Post covering education and K-12 schools in Maryland. 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/07/05/montgomery-county-lgbtq-book-opt-out/