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Yahoo
10-03-2025
- General
- Yahoo
What Happens When Teens Don't Date
Lisa A. Phillips has found herself in a strange position as of late: trying to convince her students that romantic love is worthwhile. They don't believe in overly idealizing partnership or in the clichés fed to them in rom-coms; some have declared that love is a concept created by the media. Phillips, a journalist who teaches a SUNY New Paltz course called 'Love and Heartbreak,' responds that of course relationships aren't all perfect passion, and we should question the tropes we're surrounded by. But also: Those tropes began somewhere. Across cultures, people describe the experience of falling for someone in quite similar ways, 'whether they grew up with a Disney-movie IV in their vein,' she told me, or 'in a remote area with no media whatsoever.' The sensation is big, she tells her students; it's overwhelming; it can feel utterly transcendent. They're skeptical. Maybe if Phillips had been teaching this class a decade ago, her students would already have learned some of this firsthand. Today, though, that's less likely: Research indicates that the number of teens experiencing romantic relationships has dropped. In a 2023 poll from the Survey Center on American Life, 56 percent of Gen Z adults said they'd been in a romantic relationship at any point in their teen years, compared with 76 percent of Gen Xers and 78 percent of Baby Boomers. And the General Social Survey, a long-running poll of about 3,000 Americans, found in 2021 that 54 percent of participants ages 18 to 34 reported not having a 'steady' partner; in 2004, only 33 percent said the same. As I've written, a whole lot of American adults are withdrawing from romance—not just young people. But the trend seems to be especially pronounced for Gen Z, or people born roughly between 1997 and 2012. Of course, you can grow into a perfectly mature and healthy adult without ever having had a romantic relationship; some research even suggests you might be better off that way. In the aggregate, though, this shift could be concerning: a sign, researchers told me, of a generation struggling with vulnerability. A first love, for so many, has been a milestone on the path to adulthood—a challenging, thrilling, world-expanding experience that can help people understand who they are and whom they're looking for. What's lost if that rite of passage disappears? You can experience so much without being in a defined relationship. You can flirt; you can kiss; you can dance. You can have a crush so big it takes up all the space in your brain; you can care about someone deeply; you can get hurt—badly. Plenty of young people, then, could be having transformative romantic encounters and still reporting that they've never been in a relationship. It could be the label, not the emotional reality, that's changing, Thao Ha, a developmental psychologist at Arizona State University, told me. She's found that lots of high schoolers report having 'dated' before—a looser term that might better suit the realities of adolescent courtship today. (In a YouGov poll from last year, about 50 percent of respondents aged 18 to 34 said they'd been in a 'situationship,' or undefined relationship.) Some of that activity might not entail exclusivity or regularity, or any promise of long-term commitment. But it could still help young people with what researchers told me are some core rewards of early romantic exploration: gaining autonomy from parents, developing a sense of identity, what Phillips called an 'existential' benefit—the 'sometimes painful, sometimes amazing trial-and-error process of seeking closeness.' Becoming a well-rounded grown-up, in fact, doesn't really require romantic experience of any sort. Adolescence and emerging adulthood are times of uncertainty; what young people need most, Amy Rauer, a human-development professor at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, told me, is often just a cheerleader: a peer, a grandparent, a coach, or someone else making them feel valued, which can set them up to feel secure in future relationships. Teens can also learn social skills—how to make small talk, resolve arguments, empathize across differences—in all kinds of platonic relationships. [Read: The slow, quiet demise of America romance] Some research, Phillips pointed out, actually suggests that young people might benefit from a lack of romantic activity. One study found that, compared with their dating peers, students who dated very infrequently or not at all over a seven-year period were seen by their teachers as having better leadership and social skills, and reported fewer symptoms of depression. After all, young love isn't always positive. It can be an emotional whirlwind; it can distract from schoolwork, or from friends, or from other interests. In the worst cases, it can be abusive. (Adolescent girls experience intimate-partner violence at particularly high rates.) And when it ends, teens—with little perspective and few learned coping mechanisms—can be absolutely wrecked. Despite how common a lack of relationship experience is now—especially but not only for teens—a lot of people still feel embarrassed by it. TikTok is filled with influencers declaring that they're 26 or 30 or 40 and have never been in a relationship, sharing how insecure that's made them feel; commenters stream in, by the hundreds of thousands, to divulge their own feelings of shame. Many of my friends, who are entering their 30s, constantly stress about this: They fear they won't know how to be a good partner if the opportunity arises. But all of a person's interactions, not just romantic ones, can shape how they'll show up in a relationship. One 2019 study, which followed 165 subjects ages 13 to 30, found that strong friendships in adolescence predicted romantic-life satisfaction in adulthood; early romantic experience, meanwhile, wasn't related to future satisfaction at all. (Teens commonly learn how to fight and make up with friends, Phillips told me, but they might be less likely to stick it out with a lover long enough for conflict resolution.) [Read: The dating-app diversity paradox] Overall, when it comes to who you are in a relationship, what matters most is simply who you are, period. And the traits that make you you are likely to remain fairly stable throughout your life. A 2022 study found, for instance, that subjects who were single during adolescence—but had their first relationship by age 26—reported no lower self-esteem than those who'd started dating earlier. Tita Gonzalez Avilés, a personality psychologist at Germany's Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz who has led some of this research, told me that although people often think their relationships will change them, the influence typically happens the other way around: Who you are shapes what kind of relationship you'll have. Research has even shown that people's satisfaction in a relationship tends to remain pretty consistent across their various partners. Given all that, you might think it a good thing that Gen Z has less going on in the romance department. Perhaps young people are busy with other pursuits, focusing on friendship and school and hobbies; maybe they no longer want to settle for a mediocre partner. The transition to adulthood tends to take longer today, pushing back lots of different milestones—steps such as financial independence, buying a home, and, notably, getting married—sometimes indefinitely. In that sense, young people have an eminently rational reason to hold off on seeking partnership: The deadline is extended. But researchers have pointed to other, more worrisome reasons for the romance dip. Phillips has heard a lot about situationships—and scenarios that aren't even well-defined enough to use that label. For her new book, First Love, she interviewed more than 100 young people and parents, and found, as Ha did, that early romance today tends to reside in a gray area. 'You have a long period of we're talking,' Phillips told me. 'You're kind of dancing around the idea of a sexual-romantic connection, maybe even having some of those experiences, but not really talking about what it is.' For some, the lack of strict relationship expectations can be freeing. But many, Phillips told me, find the ambiguity distressing, because they don't know what they have the right to feel—or the right to ask for. Some recounted how they ended up feeling invested in a fling—and described it not only as bad news, but as a personal failure: They said that they 'got caught' (as if red-handed), 'caught feelings' (like an illness), or succumbed to 'dumb-bitch hour' (when late at night, defenses down, they texted a crush and—God forbid—let themselves feel close to someone). 'Young people would be hard on themselves,' Phillips told me, 'because they would think, Okay, this person let me know this wasn't going to be a thing. And then my heart let it be a thing.' The young-love recession, in other words, might reflect a real shift in how comfortable Americans are, on the whole, with emotional intimacy. Generational researchers have described Gen Z as a cohort particularly concerned with security, averse to risk, and slow to trust—so it makes sense that a lot of teens today might be hesitant to throw themselves into a relationship, or even just to admit they care whether their dalliance will continue next week. In a 2023 Hinge survey of Gen Z daters, 90 percent of participants said they wanted to find love—but 56 percent said that fear of rejection had kept them from pursuing a potential relationship, and 57 percent said they'd refrained from confessing their feelings about someone because they worried it would 'be a turn-off.' Those reservations can create a self-fulfilling prophecy, Phillips said, in which young people keep a romantic prospect at arm's length—and then, when they feel confused or get hurt anyway, they become even more wary of relationships. 'Why would I want to go any further in this world,' she said many wonder, 'when I had this flirtation that seemed to be very close and very promising and went nowhere?' [Read: The people who quit dating] I heard something similar from Daniel A. Cox, the director of the Survey Center on American Life: People still badly want connection, but among Gen Z, 'there's a real sense of anxiety about how to go about it.' That social nervousness affects platonic and romantic relationships alike; he's found, in fact, that people who spend more time with friends are also more likely to have dated regularly during their teen years. 'Trying to forge romantic connections and be vulnerable—it's really difficult,' he said, 'when you're constantly worried about being hurt or being taken advantage of.' Some of that self-protective instinct has probably trickled down from older generations, especially when it comes to dynamics in heterosexual relationships. As Cox has found while reporting a forthcoming book on the gender divide, men and women seem to be growing ever further apart. Young men are shifting rightward, and many are feeling misunderstood. Women, meanwhile, have become more suspicious of men. Fear of sexual assault has increased significantly in recent years, and so has concern about dating-app safety. If so many grown women are feeling vigilant, imagine how girls and younger women feel: at a vulnerable age, still learning about the world and already surrounded by the message—and, in plenty of cases, the reality—that boys and men are dangerous. Imagine, too, how some boys and young men feel: just figuring out who they are and already getting the message that they're not trusted. Perhaps it's not surprising that people are trying to control their romantic feelings, whether by focusing on friendships or by keeping situationships allegedly emotion-free. Even under conditions of a gender cold war, many girls might get on fine—but boys could suffer more. When psychologists told me that young people can flourish in the absence of romance, that was assuming they have close friends to rely on and to teach them social graces (including one as simple as making conversation). Boys and young men, who aren't as likely to have such tight bonds, tend to learn those skills from women. Maybe they have a sister or a mother or female friends who can help with that—but if not, Cox told me, being single might put them at a real emotional and developmental disadvantage. That might make them less prepared to date. [Read: The golden age of dating doesn't exist] A rise in skepticism toward romance is a loss, not just for boys but for society as a whole. Romantic love isn't better or more important than platonic love, but it's different—and telling yourself you have no need for it doesn't necessarily make it true. Phillips talked to her students about an excerpt of Plato's Symposium, in which—at the beginning of time—Zeus splits each human in two in order to foil their plan to overthrow the gods. From then on, everyone wanders around yearning for their other half. Falling in love, according to the story, is when you finally find it. Alas: Her students hated the story. They didn't like the idea of only one other person being meant for each of us, or the suggestion that they'd be incomplete without such a reunion. They told her they wanted to be whole all by themselves—not dependent on a soulmate. They had a point. And yet, Phillips still felt there was something sad about their reaction. They didn't seem to understand that 'relationships are an interpersonal exchange,' she said: that 'they involve both feeling expanded by someone else and then some genuine sacrifices.' You are at least a little dependent on someone in a relationship; that's what the symbiosis of love requires. It's scary—but it can be interesting, and beautiful when it's good, and sometimes formative even when it doesn't stay good. You might want to find out for yourself. When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
10-03-2025
- General
- Atlantic
What Happens When Teens Don't Date
Lisa A. Phillips has found herself in a strange position as of late: trying to convince her students that romantic love is worthwhile. They don't believe in overly idealizing partnership or in the clichés fed to them in rom-coms; some have declared that love is a concept created by the media. Phillips, a journalist who teaches a SUNY New Paltz course called 'Love and Heartbreak,' responds that of course relationships aren't all perfect passion, and we should question the tropes we're surrounded by. But also: Those tropes began somewhere. Across cultures, people describe the experience of falling for someone in quite similar ways, 'whether they grew up with a Disney-movie IV in their vein,' she told me, or 'in a remote area with no media whatsoever.' The sensation is big, she tells her students; it's overwhelming; it can feel utterly transcendent. They're skeptical. Maybe if Phillips had been teaching this class a decade ago, her students would already have learned some of this firsthand. Today, though, that's less likely: Research indicates that the number of teens experiencing romantic relationships has dropped. In a 2023 poll from the Survey Center on American Life, 56 percent of Gen Z adults said they'd been in a romantic relationship at any point in their teen years, compared with 76 percent of Gen Xers and 78 percent of Baby Boomers. And the General Social Survey, a long-running poll of about 3,000 Americans, found in 2021 that 54 percent of participants ages 18 to 34 reported not having a 'steady' partner; in 2004, only 33 percent said the same. As I've written, a whole lot of American adults are withdrawing from romance—not just young people. But the trend seems to be especially pronounced for Gen Z, or people born roughly between 1997 and 2012. Of course, you can grow into a perfectly mature and healthy adult without ever having had a romantic relationship; some research even suggests you might be better off that way. In the aggregate, though, this shift could be concerning: a sign, researchers told me, of a generation struggling with vulnerability. A first love, for so many, has been a milestone on the path to adulthood—a challenging, thrilling, world-expanding experience that can help people understand who they are and whom they're looking for. What's lost if that rite of passage disappears? You can experience so much without being in a defined relationship. You can flirt; you can kiss; you can dance. You can have a crush so big it takes up all the space in your brain; you can care about someone deeply; you can get hurt—badly. Plenty of young people, then, could be having transformative romantic encounters and still reporting that they've never been in a relationship. It could be the label, not the emotional reality, that's changing, Thao Ha, a developmental psychologist at Arizona State University, told me. She's found that lots of high schoolers report having 'dated' before—a looser term that might better suit the realities of adolescent courtship today. (In a YouGov poll from last year, about 50 percent of respondents aged 18 to 34 said they'd been in a 'situationship,' or undefined relationship.) Some of that activity might not entail exclusivity or regularity, or any promise of long-term commitment. But it could still help young people with what researchers told me are some core rewards of early romantic exploration: gaining autonomy from parents, developing a sense of identity, what Phillips called an 'existential' benefit—the 'sometimes painful, sometimes amazing trial-and-error process of seeking closeness.' Becoming a well-rounded grown-up, in fact, doesn't really require romantic experience of any sort. Adolescence and emerging adulthood are times of uncertainty; what young people need most, Amy Rauer, a human-development professor at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, told me, is often just a cheerleader: a peer, a grandparent, a coach, or someone else making them feel valued, which can set them up to feel secure in future relationships. Teens can also learn social skills—how to make small talk, resolve arguments, empathize across differences—in all kinds of platonic relationships. Some research, Phillips pointed out, actually suggests that young people might benefit from a lack of romantic activity. One study found that, compared with their dating peers, students who dated very infrequently or not at all over a seven-year period were seen by their teachers as having better leadership and social skills, and reported fewer symptoms of depression. After all, young love isn't always positive. It can be an emotional whirlwind; it can distract from schoolwork, or from friends, or from other interests. In the worst cases, it can be abusive. (Adolescent girls experience intimate-partner violence at particularly high rates.) And when it ends, teens—with little perspective and few learned coping mechanisms—can be absolutely wrecked. Despite how common a lack of relationship experience is now—especially but not only for teens—a lot of people still feel embarrassed by it. TikTok is filled with influencers declaring that they're 26 or 30 or 40 and have never been in a relationship, sharing how insecure that's made them feel; commenters stream in, by the hundreds of thousands, to divulge their own feelings of shame. Many of my friends, who are entering their 30s, constantly stress about this: They fear they won't know how to be a good partner if the opportunity arises. But all of a person's interactions, not just romantic ones, can shape how they'll show up in a relationship. One 2019 study, which followed 165 subjects ages 13 to 30, found that strong friendships in adolescence predicted romantic-life satisfaction in adulthood; early romantic experience, meanwhile, wasn't related to future satisfaction at all. (Teens commonly learn how to fight and make up with friends, Phillips told me, but they might be less likely to stick it out with a lover long enough for conflict resolution.) Overall, when it comes to who you are in a relationship, what matters most is simply who you are, period. And the traits that make you you are likely to remain fairly stable throughout your life. A 2022 study found, for instance, that subjects who were single during adolescence—but had their first relationship by age 26—reported no lower self-esteem than those who'd started dating earlier. Tita Gonzalez Avilés, a personality psychologist at Germany's Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz who has led some of this research, told me that although people often think their relationships will change them, the influence typically happens the other way around: Who you are shapes what kind of relationship you'll have. Research has even shown that people's satisfaction in a relationship tends to remain pretty consistent across their various partners. Given all that, you might think it a good thing that Gen Z has less going on in the romance department. Perhaps young people are busy with other pursuits, focusing on friendship and school and hobbies; maybe they no longer want to settle for a mediocre partner. The transition to adulthood tends to take longer today, pushing back lots of different milestones—steps such as financial independence, buying a home, and, notably, getting married—sometimes indefinitely. In that sense, young people have an eminently rational reason to hold off on seeking partnership: The deadline is extended. But researchers have pointed to other, more worrisome reasons for the romance dip. Phillips has heard a lot about situationships—and scenarios that aren't even well-defined enough to use that label. For her new book, First Love, she interviewed more than 100 young people and parents, and found, as Ha did, that early romance today tends to reside in a gray area. 'You have a long period of we're talking,' Phillips told me. 'You're kind of dancing around the idea of a sexual-romantic connection, maybe even having some of those experiences, but not really talking about what it is.' For some, the lack of strict relationship expectations can be freeing. But many, Phillips told me, find the ambiguity distressing, because they don't know what they have the right to feel—or the right to ask for. Some recounted how they ended up feeling invested in a fling—and described it not only as bad news, but as a personal failure: They said that they 'got caught' (as if red-handed), 'caught feelings' (like an illness), or succumbed to 'dumb-bitch hour' (when late at night, defenses down, they texted a crush and—God forbid—let themselves feel close to someone). 'Young people would be hard on themselves,' Phillips told me, 'because they would think, Okay, this person let me know this wasn't going to be a thing. And then my heart let it be a thing.' The young-love recession, in other words, might reflect a real shift in how comfortable Americans are, on the whole, with emotional intimacy. Generational researchers have described Gen Z as a cohort particularly concerned with security, averse to risk, and slow to trust —so it makes sense that a lot of teens today might be hesitant to throw themselves into a relationship, or even just to admit they care whether their dalliance will continue next week. In a 2023 Hinge survey of Gen Z daters, 90 percent of participants said they wanted to find love—but 56 percent said that fear of rejection had kept them from pursuing a potential relationship, and 57 percent said they'd refrained from confessing their feelings about someone because they worried it would 'be a turn-off.' Those reservations can create a self-fulfilling prophecy, Phillips said, in which young people keep a romantic prospect at arm's length—and then, when they feel confused or get hurt anyway, they become even more wary of relationships. 'Why would I want to go any further in this world,' she said many wonder, 'when I had this flirtation that seemed to be very close and very promising and went nowhere?' Read: The people who quit dating I heard something similar from Daniel A. Cox, the director of the Survey Center on American Life: People still badly want connection, but among Gen Z, 'there's a real sense of anxiety about how to go about it.' That social nervousness affects platonic and romantic relationships alike; he's found, in fact, that people who spend more time with friends are also more likely to have dated regularly during their teen years. 'Trying to forge romantic connections and be vulnerable—it's really difficult,' he said, 'when you're constantly worried about being hurt or being taken advantage of.' Some of that self-protective instinct has probably trickled down from older generations, especially when it comes to dynamics in heterosexual relationships. As Cox has found while reporting a forthcoming book on the gender divide, men and women seem to be growing ever further apart. Young men are shifting rightward, and many are feeling misunderstood. Women, meanwhile, have become more suspicious of men. Fear of sexual assault has increased significantly in recent years, and so has concern about dating-app safety. If so many grown women are feeling vigilant, imagine how girls and younger women feel: at a vulnerable age, still learning about the world and already surrounded by the message—and, in plenty of cases, the reality—that boys and men are dangerous. Imagine, too, how some boys and young men feel: just figuring out who they are and already getting the message that they're not trusted. Perhaps it's not surprising that people are trying to control their romantic feelings, whether by focusing on friendships or by keeping situationships allegedly emotion-free. Even under conditions of a gender cold war, many girls might get on fine—but boys could suffer more. When psychologists told me that young people can flourish in the absence of romance, that was assuming they have close friends to rely on and to teach them social graces (including one as simple as making conversation). Boys and young men, who aren't as likely to have such tight bonds, tend to learn those skills from women. Maybe they have a sister or a mother or female friends who can help with that—but if not, Cox told me, being single might put them at a real emotional and developmental disadvantage. That might make them less prepared to date. Read: The golden age of dating doesn't exist A rise in skepticism toward romance is a loss, not just for boys but for society as a whole. Romantic love isn't better or more important than platonic love, but it's different —and telling yourself you have no need for it doesn't necessarily make it true. Phillips talked to her students about an excerpt of Plato's Symposium, in which—at the beginning of time—Zeus splits each human in two in order to foil their plan to overthrow the gods. From then on, everyone wanders around yearning for their other half. Falling in love, according to the story, is when you finally find it. Alas: Her students hated the story. They didn't like the idea of only one other person being meant for each of us, or the suggestion that they'd be incomplete without such a reunion. They told her they wanted to be whole all by themselves—not dependent on a soulmate. They had a point. And yet, Phillips still felt there was something sad about their reaction. They didn't seem to understand that 'relationships are an interpersonal exchange,' she said: that 'they involve both feeling expanded by someone else and then some genuine sacrifices.' You are at least a little dependent on someone in a relationship; that's what the symbiosis of love requires. It's scary—but it can be interesting, and beautiful when it's good, and sometimes formative even when it doesn't stay good. You might want to find out for yourself.
New York Times
04-03-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
The Archives Tried to Erase Her Family. She Tells Their Story.
When Martha S. Jones was a student at SUNY New Paltz, she took a course called 'Black Sociology' with Prof. James Bowen. It was the mid-1970s, and the first Black studies department, founded at San Francisco State University at the height of 1960s student protests, was less than a decade old. As part of the first generation of African-descended young people to engage with Black culture and history in the college classroom, Jones was excited for all that Bowen's class could offer. Despite her fair skin and 'hair too limp' (her words), she relished the chance to become 'sisters of the skin' with her classmates. Rather than camaraderie, however, Jones experienced a humiliating confrontation while giving an oral presentation on Frantz Fanon's book 'A Dying Colonialism.' Looking back on the incident in her consummately readable, lyrically rendered new memoir, 'The Trouble of Color,' Jones, an award-winning professor and gifted historian at Johns Hopkins University, acknowledges that her Blackness was not the same as Fanon's. 'Fanon came of age in colonized Martinique and then through military service and medical training,' she writes. 'Instead, my self-discovery began in that cinder-block and linoleum upstate New York classroom.' Anxious to please and struggling through her first attempt at public speaking, Jones gave a mechanical recitation of Fanon's work, inciting protest from her classmates. One of the most vocal critics was Ron, a 'suitably brilliant, handsome and outspokenly confident' student, who scoffed, 'Enough of this. We shouldn't have to listen to this. She doesn't even know where the French Antilles are.' Jones, the author of multiple, field-defining works of African American history, understands this painful moment as a consequence of adolescent racial gatekeeping, predicated on the other students' assumptions about her Blackness. But as an 18-year-old, she attempted to deflect the accusation of racial inauthenticity by saying, 'Well … the French Antilles are in France.' She eventually befriended Ron but never forgot what he spat at her: 'Who do you think you are?' 'The Trouble of Color' is an attempt to answer this question through a sophisticated analysis of race using Jones's own family history as a prism, while implicitly arguing for the centrality of Black women scholars in the historical profession. Jones's paternal grandfather was David Dallas Jones (1887-1956), a North Carolina native, graduate of Wesleyan University and president of Bennett College, in Greensboro, N.C., now one of only two all-women H.B.C.U.s in the United States (Spelman College, in Atlanta, is the other). Jones knew him as 'Grandy,' although he died before she was born. The affectionate nickname belies David Jones's significance. Under his presidency, Bennett, founded in 1873, became known as the 'Vassar of the South,' a place where Black women, the children and grandchildren of enslaved people, obtained a rigorous liberal arts education in defiance of cultural expectations. Alumnae include Belinda Foster, North Carolina's first Black woman district attorney; Carolyn Payton, the first Black woman head of the Peace Corps; and Gladys A. Robinson, a North Carolina state senator. Martha Jones's father, David Dallas Jones Jr., along with his siblings and kin, grew up within the segregated yet racially proud world of Bennett College, and the stories she heard about ancestors, enslaved and free, who navigated the 20th-century color line shaped her subsequent scholarship. 'The Trouble of Color' is a pointed rebuttal to those who still insist that enslaved peoples' histories are unknowable, or that Black people cannot be trusted as narrators of their own past. In a moving passage at the beginning of the book, Jones describes her frustration during the 1980s and '90s when, reviewing literature in the nascent field of Black women's history, she uncovered secondary sources that whitewashed her family's past. One source mistook her grandfather for white, an inference presumably derived from photos depicting his light complexion. Another source, a scholar of the civil rights movement, misspelled the name of Susie W. Jones, David Dallas Jones's wife and Martha's beloved grandmother Musie, whom he'd interviewed for his book — an error as grating for Jones as it is for many Black women who have routinely been misnamed or decredentialed, either deliberately or in ignorance. As Martha Jones puts it, 'I boiled with outrage, and one of Musie's stories came immediately to mind: In the Jim Crow years, she'd battled local white people to be addressed by her preferred name — 'Mrs. Jones' — rather than the overly familiar 'Susie' or the demeaning 'Gal.' For people like my grandmother, what they were called mattered.' Jones's account of these errors is particularly poignant coming at a time when a respected scholar and the first Black woman president of Harvard University can be dismissed as an incompetent 'diversity hire.' Black women's history, Jones insists, is vital for those who want to honor the generations of Black people who paved the way for our current achievements. Although she never says so explicitly, Jones's compelling descriptions of reading the archives, accompanied by images from the archives themselves, make clear that she understands the central role Black women historians have played in disrupting an academy that, like much of the world, constantly demands that we prove ourselves. At one point, Jones recounts a visit to Oxmoor Farm, in Louisville, Ky., in search of traces of her oldest known ancestor. Here Jones is at her analytical best, as she relates her ancestor Nancy Bell Graves's enslavement to Martha Fry Bell, the wife of a Danville, Ky., merchant. After a dogged search, Jones unearths records of Nancy and her husband, Edmund, in the papers of a white professor and enslaver, Ormond Beatty. She discovers that Nancy had at least two sisters, Tinah and Betty — their names listed in holdings at Centre College in Danville that, according to the confident local archivist, contained no traces of Jones's family. This find leads Jones to the Filson Historical Society in Louisville and then to Oxmoor Farm, where she is struck by the decadence of a house museum maintained on the grounds where her ancestors were possibly enslaved. Jones enters Oxmoor in a state of high emotion, but she is comforted by the words of the historian Nell Irvin Painter, who advises colleagues to 'remember the blood on the page' — a mantra that Jones, in a heartbreaking scene, repeats to herself as she searches for evidence of Nancy's kin at Oxmoor. The experience is a reminder, she writes, that 'the documents I sometimes read, though neat and elegantly scripted, had their origins in brutal force.' In 'The Trouble of Color,' Jones has done more than honor her family's history; she reinscribes their story on the tablet of our collective imagination. On Jan. 4, Thavolia Glymph, a historian at Duke University, delivered her final address as president of the American Historical Association. Like Jones, Glymph is a towering figure in her field, part of the cadre of Black women scholars who inform so much of Jones's work. In her speech, Glymph, the first Black woman to head the A.H.A., argued against popular assumptions, both within and outside the academy, that the stories of America's enslaved people can never be told, and that the archive, as we have traditionally understood it, cannot be relied upon to reveal the intricacies of Black life. 'The archive of slavery is not a black hole,' Glymph said. 'The desires of slaveholders are not of such density and gravity that the voices of enslaved people cannot be heard. This is not the archive of the enslaved with which I work. The archive I have, and that we have, is one in which enslaved people speak, loudly, and act with intention.' At a time when Black history is under attack, Glymph asks us to recognize that those histories we deny or deem unknowable are everywhere in the historical record — precisely what Jones's beautiful memoir confirms.
Yahoo
27-01-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Professors use 'living lab' model with students to introduce campus upgrades: 'It's a very, very positive step'
Professors and staff at SUNY New Paltz are planting the seeds of what sustainability-focused education could look like across the country. Associate professor Michael Sheridan is one of many leading the charge. According to The Hechinger Report, one of his business classes has an emphasis on the environment. It allows students to pitch proposals for green campus initiatives, including solar panels over a parking lot — which are projected to save the university more than $787,000 in energy costs over 50 years. Sheridan is a major contributor to the process of making New Paltz a "living lab," a new kind of collaborative teaching practice that is blooming on several campuses. "I think it's a very, very positive step," said senior scholar Bryan Alexander, who authored Universities on Fire: Higher Education in the Climate Crisis. "You've got the campus materials, you've got the integration of teaching and research." Sheridan's business background also proves that you don't have to be fully focused on the environment to be a part of an initiative like this. Anyone can bridge together any number of interests with sustainability. Working toward a cleaner future is open to everyone. Another staff member leading the charge at New Paltz is Lisa Mitten, the campus sustainability coordinator. Mitten runs a sustainability faculty fellows program that encourages professors to incorporate environmental issues into their classes. She also works with student sustainability ambassadors. One of her biggest projects involves collaborating with other New York State higher education institutions to use more renewable, non-polluting energy sources on campuses. One of New Paltz's sustainability faculty fellows, associate professor of theatre design Andrea Varga, teaches an ethical fashion course within the university's honors program. Varga's students also pitch ideas about how to engage in sustainable fashion on campus and beyond. A couple of her students have even worked on a project to install microplastic filters in campus laundry rooms. Which of the following sustainable changes would make you most likely to choose a particular airline? Using cleaner fuel Reducing in-flight waste Making it easy to choose low-emissions itineraries I don't pay attention to sustainability when I fly Click your choice to see results and speak your mind. SUNY New Paltz offers programs focused on environmental science and environmental studies. The former is science-focused, and the latter is interdisciplinary. There is also a sustainability track for business students, and there are classes with a sustainability course designation. These educational paths exist because faculty and staff members want to support students' interests. Sheridan, Mitten, and Varga are a few of the many people who want to provide valuable, hands-on experience. While there are several ways to gain an education, their work is making it easier for students who want traditional experiences to learn about and implement sustainability in the world around them. The initiatives involving solar panels and microplastic filters will not just save communities money and benefit public health, but they will also keep the environment cleaner. Many students want to act in order to have a better future. Take Madeleine Biles, a senior management major who interned with the Lake George Land Conservancy over the summer. Biles told The Hechinger Report that she chose New Paltz because of its alignment with work related to the environment. She also hopes taking this action will allow her to process her feelings related to the rising global temperature, which has caused extreme weather to grow more intense, threatened food security, and contributed to disease spread, among other things. "I think if I have a career in sustainability, that will be my way of channeling that frustration and sadness and turning it into a positive thing," she and staff at SUNY New Paltz are planting the seeds of what sustainability-focused education could look like across the country. Join our free newsletter for good news and useful tips, and don't miss this cool list of easy ways to help yourself while helping the planet.
