The first time I approached the story of Saartjie Baartman, I built a cage around the audience. It was a sound cage — an attempt to make the audience feel, even for a moment, what it might mean to be placed on display. My movements triggered a sound loop that repeated through the room as the choreography continued. Beat after beat, the structure relied on repetition until sensation overtook comfort. In her time, Baartman was displayed throughout Europe objectified and exhibited as a curiosity for audiences eager to consume difference. I wanted to trouble the act of looking itself. I set out to haunt the conscience of the room. Instead, I found myself haunted.

Beneath the concept of exploring objectification and discomfort was something more personal. A tell-tale heart — a sound that grows louder the more you try to contain it. I believed that if I engineered the structure precisely enough, the meaning would land — that scale would intensify truth. Instead, the performance structure exposed me. During one performance, the loop cut out. The repetition vanished — and with it the cool effect that made the work seem innovative. The floor went silent. I stood there, aware that the audience was no longer watching the concept. They were watching me. In frustration, I broke the fourth wal l— not as strategy, but as ego. I cussed out the audience — not at them, but because I had just ruined my own piece.

From the ruins of the piece, I had a realization. It is easier to accuse spectatorship than to examine one’s own role in it. I was trying to make something architecturally airtight and intellectually impressive. If I am honest, I was also trying to sound smart. The work did not falter because it lacked ambition. It faltered because I had not yet aligned myself with what I was asking the work to hold.

Saartjie Baartman’s name carries historical weight. A South African woman, she was exhibited in 19th-century Europe under dehumanizing conditions. Ultimately, her body became a spectacle and taxonomy. For artists, that symbolism is potent and opens urgent conversations about race, power, and objectification. As I continued researching her experience, something unsettled me. My lived experience as a contemporary Black American woman did not mirror Baartman’s historical conditions. I could study her life. I could feel proximity to her story. But proximity is not equivalence.

Around that same time, I was volunteering with young people who had survived sexual exploitation. Listening to them shifted something fundamental. In their stories, I heard echoes of lives that felt closer to Baartman’s historical reality than to my own. The recognition was sobering. One question kept returning: Was I constructing work around inherited suffering that was not fully mine to perform? Instead of abandoning the project, I complicated it.

I met a visual artist willing to imagine Baartman differently. Together we began rewriting her —not as a specimen or tragic emblem, but as a superhero in a mini zine titled Wildcard. Saartjie, or Lady Sarah, was self-possessed, wry, powerful, and refused containment.

In a deck of cards, a wildcard does not belong to a single suit. It can shift value. It can alter the direction of the game without overturning the table. The name felt right. Baartman’s historical image had been fixed — categorized, labeled, contained. A wildcard refuses fixed placement. It introduces movement into systems that prefer certainty.

And still, I wrestled with form.

At one stage, I borrowed the beat from L’il Mama’s Lip Gloss and looped it until the room leaned forward. I understood what that rhythm carries — shine, visibility, consumability, and I let the complexity sit there. I bopped to it, and so did the audience. A rhythm can celebrate presence. It can also shrink Black women into surface. That tension lived inside the work.

I stitched body parts into the choreography as fragments layered onto fragments, intending to critique the dissection and display imposed on Black bodies. Yet in doing so, I confronted how easily critique can mirror the structure it seeks to expose. The piece had become a creature assembled from theory, history, sound, and ego. The gloss shimmered, but the question of alignment did not disappear.

In later iterations, the work shifted tone. I presented Wildcard in academic and community spaces where satire replaced immersion. The setting became Club Afterlife: a liminal space where history loosens its grip long enough to be examined differently. Here women of history who have faced undue objectification could imagine a new end to their stories.

Marie Antoinette and Saartjie Baartman were not adversaries. They were unlikely companions — two women shaped by spectacle in different centuries, comparing notes — yet history had flattened them into symbols. In this imagined afterlife, they could speak.

The metaphor was simple: Can you perform a whole-bodied act in parts? Can you separate intellect from flesh, head from torso, history from body — and still succeed? Marie strategizes. She intellectualizes. At one point, she even removes her head, determined to prove that thought alone can win. She still loses. Saartjie stays intact. The body refuses fragmentation.

At one conference, I invited the audience to test the theory. We found ourselves — academics in sensible shoes included — bending backward beneath an imaginary bar in a hotel ballroom. It was slightly absurd. But it was also clarifying. We were all trying very hard to understand embodiment. Then we had to embody it. Embodiment cannot be footnoted. Integration cannot be compartmentalized.

In the years following the pandemic, conversations around identity and representation intensified across artistic spaces. Statements often came before movement. Language grew sharper. Expectations became more explicit. I felt the subtle pressure to position myself before I moved — to define my place in the conversation before making the work. Instead, I found myself asking a quieter question: Was I aligned with the work I was making? Not politically aligned. Not rhetorically aligned. Ethically aligned. Nearly nine years of sobriety have taught me the difference between intensity and clarity. I know what heat feels like. I also know what quiet feels like. If Wildcard was going to survive, it needed alignment — not proximity to trauma, not institutional approval.

Before literary ghosts entered the room, the name Faulkner already lived in my family. My great-grandmother was Marie Faulkner. The story began at a kitchen table long before it entered theory. Choosing the pen name M. Octavia Faulkner was not an attempt to borrow weight. The “M.” holds two lineages — my great-grandmother Marie, and Mary Shelley, whose stitched creature once echoed in my studio experiments. Blood and imagination. Inheritance and invention.

Wildcard is evolving into a larger work — part satire, part embodied inquiry- and what I call a “satirical séance.” Unlike the private haunting of misalignment, this séance is communal. It invites participants to call history into the room not to reenact spectacle, but to examine it together. The workshops that accompany the piece are designed as spaces of reconnection rather than division. Through movement, dialogue, and humor, participants explore what it means to remain whole — to resist fragmentation in their own thinking and bodies. The aim is not accusation, but integration. Wholeness is not achieved in isolation; it is practiced in relationship.

The FAIR Artist Grant supports this developmental stage: rehearsal time, collaboration, embodied testing. Applying did not feel like chasing validation. Receiving the grant did not feel like triumph. It felt like seeking and making room. Room to draft. Room to test. Room to build without constructing another cage. Saartjie — Lady Sarah — is no longer displayed. No longer compartmentalized. No longer engineered.

FAIR’s support allows Wildcard to move from concept into embodied experimentation, where these questions live not just on the page, but also in the body and in the community. The tell-tale heart I once tried to engineer into the floor was never Baartman’s alone. It was my own misalignment, beating louder each time I tried to bury it beneath structure, theory, or spectacle. I mistook intensity for truth. I mistook volume for clarity. Alignment does not silence the heart. It steadies it. Fully whole, she wins, we all win — and in her wholeness we are reminded that none of us stand intact alone. The script is still in progress. The stage is waiting.

Share

We welcome you to share your thoughts on this piece in the comments below. Click here to view our comment section moderation policy.

The opinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of Fair For All or its employees.

In keeping with our mission to promote a common culture of fairness, understanding, and humanity, we are committed to including a diverse range of voices and to encouraging compassionate, good-faith discourse.

We are actively seeking perspectives on this topic and others. If you’d like to join the conversation, please send completed drafts to submissions@fairforall.org.

I consider myself a law-abiding person. I’ve never seen a jail cell, I’ve never been sued. I’ve gotten one speeding ticket (I was driving to the airport and was concerned I would miss my flight) and two parking tickets (both times were unintentional). I begrudgingly pay my taxes — on time and always respect the rights of others.

So why am I, of all people, formally notifying my employer that I won’t comply with their policy on “respectful treatment” in the workplace? Because it demands that I use names and pronouns to affirm a gender identity I do not believe exists. My refusal isn’t about disrespect. It’s about refusing to let the government, or my taxpayer-funded employer, force me to speak words I do not believe.

I work as a substitute fitness instructor for South Suburban Parks and Recreation District (SSPRD) in south metro Denver. I’ve been there for several years, teaching a few classes a month. I love this job! The recreation centers are community hubs where people of all ages come to move, sweat, connect, and feel alive. There’s joy in the air, but also real responsibility: I’m recertified in first aid every two years because instructors have literally saved lives when patrons suffer heart attacks or strokes mid-workout. Safety isn’t optional here. It’s part of the community culture.

SSPRD recently updated its definition of harassment to include the “deliberate use of the wrong name or gender pronouns.” Under this policy, a woman who objects to undressing alongside a trans-identifying male in the women’s locker room — or who simply voices discomfort — now risks being accused of harassment. These are not abstract concerns. Locker rooms and restrooms are spaces where women and girls are at their most physically vulnerable. The expectation of privacy is not a preference; it’s a fundamental aspect of human dignity that the law is now stripping away. The district is simply following state law, but that law has pushed Colorado into dangerous territory.

Living in this state feels increasingly surreal. Colorado’s governing majority has made it crystal clear: the feelings of the LGBTQ community must be protected at almost any cost. No hurt feelings. No perceived slights. No “misgendering.” Ever. The message is that immutable sex, as well as the privacy and safety needs of women and girls in sex-segregated spaces, — must take a back seat. If you’re a woman like me who believes that sex is a biological reality determined by chromosomes, not feelings, and that locker rooms, restrooms, and sports should reflect that reality, you’re the problem. You’re the one who must be retrained, silenced, or punished.

This isn’t balance. It’s ideology enforced by law. This is compelled speech, and it has gone too far. Constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley recently called Colorado “arguably the most anti-free speech state in the union.” In a recent opinion piece, he documented how the state’s latest law — HB 25-1312, the so-called Kelly Loving Act — expands the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act to treat “chosen names” and preferred pronouns as protected aspects of “gender expression.” Refuse to play along in employment or public accommodations, and you risk a discrimination claim. Turley sees this as part of a broader, relentless pattern: Colorado keeps passing laws that compel speech, punish dissent, and test the limits of the First Amendment — only to lose in federal court again and again.

I’m not a lawyer or an activist. I’m a mom, a fitness instructor, and a woman who simply wants to do her job without being forced to overlook basic biology. I will treat every patron and coworker with basic courtesy and professionalism. I will use neutral language where possible. But I will not affirm what I believe to be false. And I will not quietly accept that women must surrender our privacy in locker rooms and restrooms to accommodate a trans-identifying man’s feelings.

This is why FAIR sent a letter to SSPRD leadership on my behalf in March. The letter puts SSPRD on notice that compelling employees to use language that violates their sincerely held beliefs implicates the First Amendment, and that FAIR is prepared to pursue legal remedies if the district moves to discipline or terminate me for my refusal. I will not comply with any directive that compels me to speak against my conscience. I remain fully committed to performing every other aspect of my job. If the district chooses to discipline or terminate me for this, I am prepared to defend my rights under the First Amendment.

The Colorado Legislature has determined that compelling speech on a contested ideological matter is a legitimate condition of employment. They have decided that one group’s emotional comfort outweighs everyone else’s speech rights and physical safety. And they have put every taxpayer-funded public entity in an extraordinarily difficult position: either comply with the statute and risk infringing on the First Amendment rights of employees and patrons, or prioritize those constitutional protections and prepare for a potential confrontation with the state Civil Rights Commission. It is unfortunate that well-meaning employers like SSPRD are caught in the middle of this broader legal and cultural conflict.

Two things can be true at once: every person deserves to be treated fairly and with dignity, and no one should be required by the government or their employer to affirm beliefs they do not hold. I hope that the Colorado Legislature comes to that understanding sooner than later.

Share

We welcome you to share your thoughts on this piece in the comments below. Click here to view our comment section moderation policy.

The opinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of Fair For All or its employees.

In keeping with our mission to promote a common culture of fairness, understanding, and humanity, we are committed to including a diverse range of voices and to encouraging compassionate, good-faith discourse.

We are actively seeking perspectives on this topic and others. If you’d like to join the conversation, please send completed drafts to submissions@fairforall.org.

From my first encounters with literature as a child — Anne of Green Gables and The Secret Garden — I had a sense I was in contact with something sacred and eternal. As a teenager working part-time at my neighborhood bookshop in Toronto, I marked up my novels with passionate highlights, asterisks, and margin notes on sentences that seemed to transcend earthly boundaries. My old copy of Émile Zola’s Germinal contains my favorite margin note in all-caps: HUMANITY PREVALENT. A novel about the plight of coal miners in 1860s France, Germinal is political but its primary concern is something much more profound. This is precisely why it endures — and why a fifteen-year old on her summer vacation in 1990s Canada found it gripping and moving and unforgettable.

In his 1954 introduction to Germinal, Leonard Tancock observed: "A work of art must have some fundamental human truth; it must not merely make a number of puppets dance to a political tune . . . Zola is not merely concerned with demonstrating some theory of his about trade unions or socialism, but with universal human nature." His conclusion: "Humanity, then, is the real hero of Germinal.”

Herein lies the tragedy of the modern literary world. Reaching for the universal, the transcendent, and the eternal in works of fiction is not just de-emphasized, it is actively discouraged by those with the power to publish these books. Over the past ten years, the industry has shifted sharply to focus on topics and criteria that divide us— on parameters that restrict, muddle, and sideline artists and undermine literature as a force that unites, illuminates, and uplifts.

My journey as an author, first published by a Big Five publisher in 2017, coincided with the rise of this new, flattening orthodoxy. Seemingly overnight, literary gatekeepers made inclusivity their responsibility and primary purpose: agents heavily prioritized identity categories in their bios and wish lists; publishers hired sensitivity readers to screen manuscripts and ensure words did not "trigger" readers; and literary estates altered the works of great authors like Roald Dahl and Ian Fleming posthumously to align them with present-day progressive standards. Literary art was now judged by criteria unrelated to its quality or substance. The vision of the writer was subjugated to the anticipated feelings of a subset of readers. "Everyone has a story to tell" became the industry mantra, but only if you tell it the right way — and only if your profile checks the right boxes.

Working on my sophomore novel in this new regime, I second-guessed everything I wrote, my fingers freezing at the keyboard. Instead of focusing on the pursuit of beauty — what had always been my motivation to write — I was preoccupied with whether gatekeepers would find my work "acceptable." As a fiercely independent person who has always charted my own course, resisting labels, tuning out trends, and having no desire to make political statements with my work, I felt immense pressure on all of these fronts. An intrusive ogre loomed over my shoulder, evaluating my sentences against a politically-charged rulebook, filling me with dread, and choking my inspiration.

I wasn’t alone. This was happening to writers the world over. In 2021, Sir Kazuo Ishiguro spoke out about the "climate of fear" and self-censorship spreading among less established writers, calling it "a dangerous state of affairs." Lionel Shriver described the "universal cowardice at the top [of publishing] and complete capitulation to orthodoxy in younger staff who you would think have no power, but…they've started running the place." A mass muting was in progress: artistic expression was being tamped down and distorted to meet a set of non-negotiable requirements. I was dismayed when a young, aspiring novelist wrote to me: "I added a progressive left lean to the ending of my novel . . . I think it's just aligned with my views to not seem too forced but I probably wouldn't have done it if I wasn't afraid of getting it seen otherwise."

As a lifelong believer that literature is the expression of the human soul — divinely inspired to illuminate the human condition and offer meaning and light in pain and darkness — I wasn't willing to alter my work to meet external standards. When pitching my new novel, I ran straight into the brick wall of gatekeepers, who told me my writing didn't honor the current political and social climate, lacking relevance and committing the ultimate crime of insensitivity. One literary agent said my characters’ response to the 9/11 tragedy, written from my Xennial vantage point, would offend Gen Z readers, many of whom were toddlers or not yet born on 9/11, who could not fathom their behavior. Surprised by the intensity of emotion surging inside me, I replied:

"Part of [literature's] purpose is to enlighten people with a point of view about the human condition . . . To offer a porthole out of their own bubble. Yielding to others' sensitivities, expectations, or ideologies not only interferes with that enlightenment, but also puts a stranglehold on the creative process. This leads to more and more homogeneous and theatrical literature, with authors more concerned about offending people and saying the 'right thing' than producing beautiful and genuine art. What a tremendous loss to the world. Wuthering Heights would not exist if Emily Brontë had shaped her story around societal sensibilities or adjusted it to fit other people's expectations."

The world of literature, the domain of my childhood dreams, was turning into a factory spitting out compliant products disconnected from the divine and worshipping at an ideological altar. In this construct, the artist shrivels into a useful cog, only welcome if they are willing to fall in line. There is no expansion and illumination of human nature. There is no pursuit of truth and beauty. There is no true human variety, which is how literary fiction has always enhanced empathy and theory of mind more than any other genre. Humanity, I realized as I remembered my old Germinal margin note, is no longer prevalent. Literature is dying.

• • •

Then a new ogre swung into the frame like a wrecking ball. My social media feeds began filling with AI hysteria, with people I know “writing” AI-assisted books and chirping shiny talking points about the mass expansion and enhancement of creativity. LLMs and AI writing tools like Sudowrite were praised as “a salvation” by mainstream media including The New Yorker. (Sudowrite’s FAQ reads like sacrilege: “Is this magic? . . . Yes. But so is life, isn’t it?”)

The flattening of art and subversion of artists was only a precursor to the next, devastating chapter: the active overwriting of the human voice and soul by unstoppable technology, once again billed as “progress.” In hot pursuit of profits, mainstream publishing has taken no stand against the infiltration of AI despite the widespread outcries of authors, many of whom ardently support the dogmatic approach that paved the way for it. The system is forcing us into a brave new world where authenticity, variety, nuance, complexity, and strife are replaced by performance, compliance, uniformity, submission, and ease. What will happen if beautiful, heartfelt, human art — produced through struggle and expressed without mandates and machine intervention — disappears? Our civilization will lose its inner life: numbed by the algorithms, unable to think and feel deeply, with nothing to hold onto when the world goes dark. This blow could be as devastating as nuclear war — not to our bodies, but to our souls.

When I discovered FAIR, relief flooded through me. Nothing is more revitalizing than learning you are not alone when the system insists that you are the problem. I found kinship with artists around the world, from all backgrounds and demographics, spanning every medium and tradition, who believe true art — beautiful, excellent, and unapologetically human — is worth fighting for.

A few months later, I founded Dogstar Press as a refuge from ideology and artifice: a literary press uniquely devoted to beauty, sincerity, and fiction as an exclusively human art form. As AI-written and AI-assisted novels slip into the publishing machine without disclosure, Dogstar is defending the human voice and the pursuit of beauty without constraints. Our 100% Human seal — deliberately pro-human, not anti-AI, and backed by a legally binding verification process — is a badge of authenticity for readers who believe literature can only be conceived and crafted by people.

The hyper-political, hyper-digital life that has been forced upon us is a toxic condition, antithetical to our natural, God-given one. As human beings we are part of an ancient lineage, wired to seek meaning and look for silver pinpricks in a pitch-black sky to guide us. This is the role of literature and all forms of art. As the algorithms thrum away, silent and ruthless, artists seeking truth, meaning, and beauty are the last link keeping people’s hearts and senses awake. We must stand together and find patrons to sponsor this life-affirming work. It is the only way humanity will prevail.

Kimberley Tait is a novelist, writer, editor, brand builder, and founder of Dogstar Press—the independent publisher devoted to beauty, sincerity, and 100% human fiction. She is part of a New Romantic movement rising above the age of algorithms.

Share

We welcome you to share your thoughts on this piece in the comments below. Click here to view our comment section moderation policy.

The opinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of Fair For All or its employees.

In keeping with our mission to promote a common culture of fairness, understanding, and humanity, we are committed to including a diverse range of voices and to encouraging compassionate, good-faith discourse.

We are actively seeking perspectives on this topic and others. If you’d like to join the conversation, please send completed drafts to submissions@fairforall.org.

Several years ago I began hearing whispers of something I couldn't quite believe: interracial relationships like mine were now under suspicion. People of color who chose white partners were being labeled "white-adjacent," as if somehow complicit in their own erasure. White partners, in turn, were accused of “exploiting” or “colonizing” the bodies of people they love. As someone who has spent her entire life in interracial and interethnic friendships and relationships, I was mystified and disheartened by this new narrative.

Because my mother was an anthropologist, her research endeavors and social functions often immersed me among people from a variety of races, ethnicities and cultures different from my own. I learned to appreciate differences but also to recognize our shared humanity from a young age. In high school, my first boyfriend was Mexican American; the next, Native American and French; another, Puerto Rican.

As a college student traveling the world, I was drawn to people of all ethnicities and origins, eager to learn new perspectives and ways of being. It was during that time that I met and married my former South African husband. The women in my life who came later were equally varied: one Mexican American, another Jewish American; my wife of twenty years is African American. Throughout the years of study, travel, and career, my friendships extended across an even wider range of races, ethnicities and cultures. Cultivating connections across differences is, quite simply, in my nature.

Until 2020, I never gave much thought to the “interracial” nature of my own family beyond ensuring that our multiracial son fostered relationships with both sides of his extended family and had mentors who reflected his unique heritage. Family and friends in California and Montana have always embraced us. But shortly after the death of George Floyd, I started paying attention to the messages our 7th grade son was absorbing from teachers and administrators at his school. I noticed they were categorizing him as "black" to boost their diversity numbers while assigning him to read Stamped for Kids, a book that sorts every child into one of two roles: oppressor or oppressed.

Except our adopted son is neither.

His birth father is African American, and his birth mother is Mexican-Zacatecan. His two mothers are African American and European American. Our son isn’t a fraction of any of these heritages; he is all of them — just like Myles, one of the children in W. Kamau Bell and Melissa Hudson Bell’s HBO documentary 1000% Me, who describes himself as “100% Filipino, 100% African American, and 1000% a person.”

Multiracial kids are 100% of each of their parent’s ancestry, all at once and simultaneously. Yet this reality wasn’t reflected in the “black” box our son’s school had forced him into.

• • •

This experience prompted me to look more deeply into the historical practice of flattening people's identities into a single category. That’s when I learned that the monoracialization and invisibility of multiracial children runs throughout American history and continues today — initially to discriminate against people of color, and now to satisfy diversity, equity and inclusion metrics

In the 1800s, the infamous “one-drop rule” was instituted to exclude any individual with a known black ancestor from White society. Anti-miscegenation laws criminalized interracial marriage and treated the children of those unions as illegitimate. “Mulattoes,” as multiracial people were referred to at the time, were removed from the 1900 census, restored in 1910, then dropped once more in 1930. Each shift was driven by the political interests of the day.

In 2000, the U.S. census model changed once again, permitting Americans to “mark one or more” races to describe themselves. The multiracial population has since climbed to roughly 8.5 million Americans in 2024, growing about 2.7 percent a year and ranking among the fastest-growing of any demographic group. This demographic is also the country’s youngest: the median age of multiracial Americans of black ancestry, like our son, is just 19.5 years old, and nearly half are under 18.

Multiracial children comprise a large share of the next generation, yet many of them aren’t being counted — and even more aren’t being understood.

This dynamic even plays out in descriptions of our most prominent multiracial Americans. Barack Obama, whose mother was white, is almost always described as “the first black president.” On the other hand, Kamala Harris, whose parents are Jamaican American and Indian American, is described as the “first black and Indian American Vice President.” When both heritages are non-white, each is acknowledged; when one is white, however, that heritage quietly disappears. This pattern — so consistent and so unexamined — convinced me that this was a story far bigger than my own family.

• • •

I had seen this same erasure play out closer to home. For two years I served on the DEI committee of our son’s school in Missoula. My wife joined me in proposing the school become a FAIR School, committed to cultivating an environment that honors both unique identities and common humanity, welcomes diverse perspectives, and teaches civil discourse as a skill for democratic life. We presented our proposal to the school, after which the DEI committee dutifully formed a subcommittee to “explore” the idea. Despite our numerous attempts to follow up, we never heard from it again.

Months later, when the committee turned its attention to comparing the diversity of the school’s student body to that of Missoula and Montana more broadly, I volunteered to gather the data. What I found surprised me. The largest non-White group in the city, and in the state as a whole, is multiracial — yet our school provided no category for multiracial or biracial students. These children were instead sorted into a single ethnic minority box chosen by administrators: “African American,” “Asian American,” or “Latin American.” Regardless of which non-white heritage the school elected to assign, the rest of the child — every other heritage they were 100% of — simply disappeared from the data.

Determined to see how widespread this was, I pored over the school’s family directory and discovered that every single “student of color” enrolled had a white parent. They were either adopted by, or born to, a white and non-white parent. In other words, the school's diversity profile consisted almost entirely of children whose white heritage had been erased to meet diversity metrics.

Ironically, school administrators had the diversity they claimed to want. They simply refused to see it.

Watching our son navigate these frameworks made one thing clear: they weren't built for him. Race essentialism, mandatory affinity groups, and rigid oppressor/oppressed binaries do more than oversimplify the identity of multiracial children; they subtract from them. These children, and all children, deserve an education that does the opposite: one that honors every part of who they are, recognizes both America's failures and its successes, and cultivates the discourse skills needed to live in a diverse democracy.

My family’s experience, it turns out, wasn’t unusual. While listening to FAIR Advisors Eli Steele and Greg Thomas discuss multiracial identity and how to navigate belonging when society demands we choose, something clicked. That’s when I realized that arguing against existing frameworks wasn't enough. Someone needed to build a better one, starting with the children these frameworks were leaving behind.

• • •

That conviction ultimately led me to FAIR’s curriculum work. I served as the lead curriculum developer for Many Stories, One Nation, a high school Ethnic Studies course that tells the American story through the lived experiences of diverse and historically underrepresented communities, all within the framework of our shared founding principles. The curriculum has been independently assessed by the Johns Hopkins School of Education, meets ethnic studies standards in California and Oregon, and is adoption-ready for Fall 2026.

The second lesson in the curriculum’s first unit — “Identity Beyond Boundaries: Understanding Multiracialism in America” — puts students in direct conversation with the questions our family has been navigating for years. Through Toni Morrison’s short story Recitatif and contemporary case studies, students examine how racial categories are socially constructed, how multiracial experiences illuminate identity complexity for everyone, and how navigating multiple heritages can build resilience rather than fracture identity. Across nine units, the curriculum centers Indigenous, black, Latino, Asian, multiracial, religious, and immigrant voices alongside the founding ideals their experiences have tested and expanded. Civil discourse — the ability to engage across difference with honesty and respect — is woven throughout the course.

FAIR built Many Stories, One Nation for students like our son and for all students navigating a country that’s more complex than any single category can capture. If you’re an educator, administrator, or parent who wants to learn more or bring this curriculum to your school, please visit manystoriesonenation.com.

This is the course I truly hope my son has an opportunity to take before he finishes high school.

Lisa Gilbert, MPH, MA, is founder of Convergence Educational Consultancy. She lives in Montana with her wife and son.

Share

We welcome you to share your thoughts on this piece in the comments below. Click here to view our comment section moderation policy.

The opinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of Fair For All or its employees.

In keeping with our mission to promote a common culture of fairness, understanding, and humanity, we are committed to including a diverse range of voices and to encouraging compassionate, good-faith discourse.

We are actively seeking perspectives on this topic and others. If you’d like to join the conversation, please send completed drafts to submissions@fairforall.org.

In recent years, some of America’s largest library organizations have begun explicitly rejecting neutrality as a professional ideal. In 2021, the American Library Association (ALA), the profession’s dominant institutional body, adopted a resolution condemning “neutrality rhetoric” as complicit in white supremacy and fascism. The ALA later amended its Code of Ethics to commit librarians to advancing social justice activism. These changes marked a significant shift in the profession: from a model centered on intellectual freedom and viewpoint neutrality toward one increasingly comfortable with political and ideological advocacy.

For many librarians, that shift raised an uncomfortable question: if libraries are no longer neutral institutions, what are they becoming?

The Association of Library Professionals (ALP), founded in 2023, emerged in response to that question. ALP is a nonprofit focused on championing neutrality, intellectual freedom, open inquiry, and freedom of thought and speech. ALP welcomes librarians, library staff members, library board members, and concerned community members who want to work with us to ensure that libraries as institutions, and their staff, avoid ideological capture and partisan political activism, instead keeping neutrality and intellectual freedom as the lodestar of our profession.

Since the 1960s, librarianship has gradually shifted from a profession grounded in neutrality and intellectual freedom to one increasingly defined by political and ideological activism, and organizations like ALP have emerged in response to that transformation.

Although local libraries are beloved public institutions in America, most people probably don’t spend much time thinking about how the library works or what librarians do. Library associations shape the profession far beyond conferences and networking. They create ethical standards, influence hiring and training practices, guide continuing education, and lobby on political and legislative questions affecting libraries. In practice, they help define what it means to be a librarian.

Library associations also serve social, professional, and political advocacy functions. Professional associations provide a mechanism for librarians to network with one another to advance their careers. Academic librarians often need to show that they’re providing service to the profession outside of their college or university, and committee service within a library association is a great way to demonstrate this. Finally, many library associations will officially lobby for or against state and federal budget and legislative questions that affect libraries, often sponsoring annual legislative days when librarians meet directly with politicians.

America has dozens of library associations, many of which are divisions or affiliates of the ALA.

So why are a group of librarians forming yet another association?

At ALA’s 2021 Midwinter Conference, the organization formally adopted the Resolution to Condemn White Supremacy and Fascism as Antithetical to Library Work. Notably, this resolution attacks and condemns the traditional professional ethic of neutrality, declaring “…that the American Library Association…acknowledges the role of neutrality rhetoric in emboldening and encouraging white supremacy and fascism” and “charges the Working Group on Intellectual Freedom and Social Justice, with a representative from the Committee on Diversity, to review neutrality rhetoric and identify alternatives…”

By pledging unquestioning support for social justice pedagogy, and by attacking neutrality as both inimical to these goals and a prop of white supremacy and fascism, ALA made an unmistakably political statement that alienated many within the profession.

Later in 2021, ALA amended its Code of Ethics, adding a ninth item which states, “We affirm the inherent dignity and rights of every person. We work to recognize and dismantle systemic and individual biases; to confront inequity and oppression; to enhance diversity and inclusion; and to advance racial and social justice in our libraries, communities, profession, and associations through awareness, advocacy, education, collaboration, services, and allocation of resources and spaces (emphasis added).” This language represents notable overreach by ALA, clearly committing librarians not only to the ideology of critical social justice, but also to activist pursuits in service of the same.

Librarians should be free to choose their own ideologies, and to work towards justice, truth, beauty, and goodness in their “libraries, communities, profession, and associations” in ways that align with their own personal philosophy, without dictates from the ALA. Yet the reality is that librarianship has become permeated by social justice ideology, critical theory, and political activism in service of the same. While these changes often happen behind the scenes, their impact is revealed in the professional literature and the specific training sessions offered to library staff. Below are several representative examples of this new activist direction.

In 2011, Char Booth published Reflective Teaching, Effective Learning, a practical guide for academic librarians teaching undergraduates skills for finding and evaluating information. Booth’s work borrows heavily from Marxist philosopher Paulo Freire’s pedagogical theory, itself grounded in critical theory. In 2016, the Association of College and Research Libraries formally adopted the Framework for Information Literacy in Higher Education, replacing the Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education which had been in place since 2000. Drabinski’s and Tewell’s entry on Critical Information Literacy (CIL) in The International Encyclopedia of Media Literacy acknowledges that the Framework was shaped and informed by CIL, and candidly recognizes CIL’s aspirations towards activism, declaring that “libraries are not and cannot be neutral actors, and embraces the potential of libraries as catalysts for social change” and that CIL “ultimately seeks to identify and take action upon forms of oppression, and proposes to undertake the work by engaging with local communities.” These are far from fringe positions in professional librarianship, and it’s telling that Emily Drabinski later served as president of ALA from 2023-2024.

Recent professional development offerings illustrate how pervasive these ideas have become within the profession.

In April 2026, ALA’s Association of School Librarians provided an online presentation, Subversive Librarianship: Embedding Social Justice and DEI in Our Schools which encouraged librarians to “subtly and strategically embed social justice principles” into their work despite “external pressures.”

Library Journal and School Library Journal offered a multi-day, 15 credit hour class, Antiracism 201: Digging Deeper in Antiracist Library Cultures, in 2024. Stated learning objectives included “Understand tenets of antiracist theories and how they apply to libraries…Recruit, hire, retain, and promote staff in an equity-centered way…Identify and start to resist white supremacist values or qualities in your library’s internal work culture.”

Another multi-day Library Journal training in 2023, focused on “How to Build LGBTQIA+ Inclusive Libraries.” Learning outcomes for this program included: “Make yourself visible as an LGBTQIA+ advocate and ally… Create trans and gender nonconforming programs, spaces, and services … [and] Advocate for LGBTQIA+ representation in materials and services.”

Many librarians are recognizing that our profession has become heavily invested in one creedal idea: that social justice activism is the only way to be a librarian. Our professional associations issue resolutions inveighing against neutrality and calling on librarians to commit themselves to political and cultural activism in the service of social justice.

A steady stream of charged rhetoric (“book banning!”), and politically oriented professional development opportunities make it clear that librarians who disagree with the illiberal progressive political agenda (or who simply believe that libraries and librarians ought to be neutral instead of political), are either expected to either adopt these activist roles or remain silent. More and more librarians who are alarmed by these developments are making their way to organizations like ALP, which seek to return the profession to its first principles.

The ALA’s turn toward ideological activism didn’t happen overnight, and reclaiming the profession may take just as long. But the work has begun. My favorite bumper sticker says, “The world is run by those who show up.” It’s a simple but powerful reminder that ordinary people can make a lasting difference simply by deciding to participate.

Libraries were built on the foundational idea that access to knowledge belongs to everyone. That idea is worth defending, and so are our libraries. Let’s show up for them.

Share

We welcome you to share your thoughts on this piece in the comments below. Click here to view our comment section moderation policy.

The opinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of Fair For All or its employees.

In keeping with our mission to promote a common culture of fairness, understanding, and humanity, we are committed to including a diverse range of voices and to encouraging compassionate, good-faith discourse.

We are actively seeking perspectives on this topic and others. If you’d like to join the conversation, please send completed drafts to submissions@fairforall.org.

Written by Maitreya Kershner

Growing up, my race always felt like a very important part of my identity. And yet that importance always seemed to be projected onto me by outside forces, not born out of my own experience. My family culture feels like a thing on its own, disconnected from racial stereotype or assumed cultural identity. I felt I was being taught, through my community, that being biracial was supposed to mean something. But I could never place what that meaning was supposed to be.

Many people see me as white. This makes sense. I have light skin and hair. I don’t look like the “stereotypical” white person, but I certainly appear to be one. When I was little, being seen as white bugged me. I wanted my skin to be darker. I wanted it to be obvious; to take on my heritage as a kind of birthright, something that would make me stand out, that would let people see I was unique.

Some people see me as black, mostly people of color. I’m undeniably a person of color too. Ironically, calling me black follows the same logic the slave masters used, where “just one drop” turned you into the tragic mulatta of a minstrel play. Even so, I wanted to be seen as black. It connected me to a historical struggle. It made my existence feel like disobedience to racist ideology. We all long to be part of something bigger. I fell so deeply into that longing that I would become defensive whenever I felt “misidentified,” or when attention was drawn to the lightness of my skin.

Looking back, I can see that wanting to be read as black and resenting being read as white were really the same impulse: I was letting other people’s categories tell me who I was.

I’ve tried to put my struggles with racial identity behind me. And yet the questions still come up: Who are you? What are you?

The simplest answer is biracial. The term is accurate enough, but it doesn’t explain my experience as an individual; it doesn’t even specify which races. Mulatto is more specific, but it has, for good reason, fallen out of common speech. And again, it doesn’t really capture the way I experience the world. Why do I feel like I need a word to categorize myself in the first place? In a world with so many words to describe all the things a person can be, it sometimes feels like it isn’t enough to just be a person.

I like to think of my experience as “Schrödinger’s race.” In a famous thought experiment, a cat sealed in a box is imagined to be simultaneously alive and dead until someone opens the box to look, both states existing at once. Like the cat, I am both black and white, a kind of quantum superposition in human form. The box, in this metaphor, isn’t meant to be opened. And yet people keep trying. We long for the binary, for simple categories that can be easily explained. We long to understand one another, so we create an array of boxes to place ourselves in. And still we don’t understand. We just create smaller and smaller, ever more specific boxes, hoping we will one day be able to summarize all the perfect complexities of a human being.

Much of this comes from the dualism that runs through our society. We see things as one or the other — right or left, good or evil, black or white — and we deny the gray areas that are always there. We are slowly learning to escape these patterns, but their hold is hard to release. The issue lives not only in the systems we’ve built but in the way we interpret and express our reality. Most of us can’t pull ourselves out of our day-to-day perceptions long enough to see past them. And even when we glimpse a deeper truth, we struggle to put it into words.

I struggle with this often. The true feeling I’m experiencing doesn’t seem to conform to the words I know. So, I search for more words. I imagine some perfect term: a combination of sounds so self-evident that anyone hearing it would immediately understand. But even when it feels just on the tip of my tongue, the perfect word always reveals itself to be a perfect delusion. Only the feeling remains.

Maybe the feelings hardest to express are the truest ones we have. Maybe identity itself is supposed to be partly indescribable, because so many things shape who we are and how we see the world. Beyond every stereotype lie real experiences, but those experiences are never the whole story. Even people who share the same experience will process it differently, because they’re carrying different experiences of everything else. And deeper than that, there seem to be parts of each of us that don’t stem from any lived experience at all.

Through some combination of life experience and pure happenstance, I’ve found that as a queer woman of color, I don’t feel particularly connected to the identities of “queer” or “woman of color.” I feel more connected to my identity as a person, moving through space. An ever-changing human being who contains multitudes. An individual, just like everyone else. The boxes other people use to read me have never really told the truth about who I am.

When I let go of the imposed binaries, I can finally stop trying to fit myself into them. The individual pieces of an identity will never add up to the whole of a person. The cat in the box stays the cat in the box, regardless of what label gets attached. The surface things matter less than the living of an actual life. And a life, lived honestly, can never be summed up by a category.

Share

We welcome you to share your thoughts on this piece in the comments below. Click here to view our comment section moderation policy.

The opinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of Fair For All or its employees.

In keeping with our mission to promote a common culture of fairness, understanding, and humanity, we are committed to including a diverse range of voices and to encouraging compassionate, good-faith discourse.

We are actively seeking perspectives on this topic and others. If you’d like to join the conversation, please send completed drafts to submissions@fairforall.org.

I regularly watch board meetings in Culver City Unified School District (CCUSD), where my daughter is enrolled, and occasionally attend in person. Since the pandemic the district has settled into a hybrid Zoom format, which has become a biweekly ritual for me.

Recently, public commenters on Zoom stopped appearing on camera, leaving me to hear only faceless voices. So, when I heard a somewhat exasperated but genuine parent begin their public comment with: “Please, for the love of God improve your communications…” it got my attention (48:00).

She then turned to the district’s finances and enrollment.

“I will vote no on any parcel tax,” she declared. “I will campaign no for any parcel tax, because until you guys get a handle on our student body… we need a more restrictive process to prove residency, and we need to right-size our district.”

CCUSD, like many California districts, has been losing students, and a recent district-funded study projects that this trend will continue. Payroll for teachers and administrators, however, has not shrunk to match this loss, and the board is asking voters to approve a parcel tax to close the gap.

As her time expired and the parent was finishing her comments, board member Triston Ezidore interjected: “Can we mute the hate speech, please?”

There was a brief pause.

“What hate speech?” the parent asked, sounding genuinely surprised.

But there was no answer. Her audio feed was abruptly cut, and the meeting quickly moved on (50:00).

Bear in mind the parent’s remarks were about fiscal policy, enrollment management, and district budgeting, which are standard topics at any school board meeting. Yet instead of engaging with the substance of her concerns, board member Ezidore’s remark recast them as a moral violation.

I’ve seen this play out before.

Before this incident, I served on several district committees, including the high school Site Council, the Local Control Accountability Plan committee, and the district’s Equity Advisory Council. In all of these forums, disagreement was often handled indirectly.

The Equity Advisory Council operated under a recurring “Norm Setting Agreement” that asked participants to “elevate marginalized voices” and “respect intersectionality”.

I raised a concern about this process at my first meeting and told the group I could not agree to those rules. My point was simple: experience can inform a discussion, but it should not determine who is right before the discussion begins.

No one engaged with my argument.

Instead, the facilitator read aloud a prepared anti-hate statement, the kind now recited before public comment at municipal meetings. The implication was clear enough. What I had said was not just wrong, but out of bounds.

Following that meeting, I sent an email to the facilitator and fellow committee members reiterating my earlier concerns about elevating voices based on identity rather than ideas. The response, both in the meeting and in the silence that followed, largely reaffirmed the existing framework.

The exchange at the board meeting felt so familiar because the mechanism was the same. You don’t have to refute an argument if you can simply relabel it. When a perspective is framed as harmful or hateful, it no longer needs to be addressed.

The parent’s comments were about trade-offs. The district faces a structural budget problem driven by declining enrollment and a cost structure that does not easily adjust. There are only a few options: raise more revenue, reduce costs, or some combination of both.

Reasonable people will disagree about which path to take, but that is the point of public comment. Yet in that moment, one side of that debate wasn’t treated as a position, but as a voice to be “muted.”

People take note when this happens. Speaking in front of a school board can be daunting — not just for the person speaking, but also for everyone else listening. That was certainly true for me. Whether they are on Zoom, physically in the room, or watching the event later, participants learn which arguments are safe to express and which ones carry a cost.

Some people will choose to keep speaking anyway. But many will not.

Over time, the range of acceptable viewpoints narrows not by formalized rule, but by signal. The meeting still looks “open.” The microphones are still there. But the boundaries have shifted, and that has consequences. You lose the parent who came to ask a budget question and decides it is not worth it next time. You lose the observer who has a similar concern but chooses to stay silent. The community loses the expectation that public officials will engage with criticism rather than deflect it. Once that expectation erodes, effective governance suffers, as well.

School boards are one of the few places where ordinary citizens can directly question decisions about taxes, staffing, and policy. When those questions can be dismissed rather than engaged, the community loses something essential — not decorum, but accountability.

Share

We welcome you to share your thoughts on this piece in the comments below. Click here to view our comment section moderation policy.

The opinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of Fair For All or its employees.

In keeping with our mission to promote a common culture of fairness, understanding, and humanity, we are committed to including a diverse range of voices and to encouraging compassionate, good-faith discourse.

We are actively seeking perspectives on this topic and others. If you’d like to join the conversation, please send completed drafts to submissions@fairforall.org.

Empathy is an ancient moral instinct that is relatively new to the English language. From the Greek word Empatheia (meaning passion or emotion) and the Greek Pathos (meaning suffering and profound feeling), the German language produced the term Einfühlung somewhere in the late 19th century — a term describing the projection of one’s own feelings onto other human beings and even onto objects. As language evolved, the English term “empathy” came to signify the capacity to understand the feelings of another person as if they were one’s own. Yet this new term reflected a very ancient bit of moral wisdom. It is strange that in today’s polarized discourse we sometimes discard empathy as if it were the product of experimental social science and not something that in substance echoes all the way back to the gospels and beyond.

There is a story that appears in the first book of Kings in the Old Testament about King Solomon, the wisest king of Israel, and the manner in which he dispensed justice. As the story goes, Solomon was confronted with a dispute between two women, each of whom claimed to be the mother of the same infant boy. The women lived with each other and each had recently given birth to a baby, making their children the same age. During the night as they slept, so one of the women claimed, the other woman rolled over and smothered her own child to death. Waking up and realizing what she had done, the mother who had accidentally killed her son went to the bed of the other woman who lay sleeping with her child, and replaced the living child with the dead one. The woman accused of swapping the children denied this charge. Rather than interrogate the women further to rationally deduce the truth, Solomon, in his wisdom, exposed the heart of a true mother:

“Then the king said, ‘Bring me a sword.’ So they brought a sword before the king. And the king said, ‘Divide the living child in two, and give half to one and half to the other.’” (1 Kings 3:23-25)

Solomon’s command was shocking and terrifying to the woman who was the true mother of the surviving child. She pleaded for the child’s life and relinquished her claim to him, while the other woman was willing to let Solomon follow through on his intentions. Thus Solomon declared, “Give the first woman the living child, and by no means kill him; she is his mother.” By being able to inhabit the feelings of a true mother, Solomon was able to dispense true justice through an act of empathy as much as an act of wisdom.

In the modern moment we don’t usually think about empathy in relation to questions of justice except insofar as it enters the conversation under the heading of social justice. In that context, empathy for the marginalized and downtrodden can translate, in some circles, to a default deference to very liberal policies on immigration, law enforcement, public welfare, national security and DEI — policies that privilege the redistribution of resources while looking askance at the question of accountability for particular groups. It is this tendency that gives rise to a critique of empathy in principle by some on the right, encapsulated by the phrase “toxic empathy.” Criticisms of empathy often focus on the tendency to become so absorbed with the struggle and suffering of others that you lose sight of the interests of people (even in your own country or community) who may be harmed by the policies you support on the basis of empathy. “Open borders” policies are frequent targets: empathy for the developing world has opened up flood waves of migration in Europe and the United States that have resulted in the importation of crime, violence, competition for scarce resources and the uneven application of domestic laws against native-born residents.

These are not trivial concerns, but they have never constituted a good basis for rejecting empathy in principle. “Toxic empathy,” properly understood, does not reveal a destructive excess of empathy so much as a lack of it — a failure to extend compassion to people who exist beyond the groups whose challenges we find it easier to feel. Ethically speaking, it makes all the sense in the world to empathize with the struggles of undocumented immigrants, but a complete sense of empathy would also recognize the suffering of people subject to cartel violence on the southern border or workers in inner cities who have lost job opportunities or whose wages are suppressed on account of lax border enforcement policies. Any feeling heart should grieve for the Palestinians in Gaza, yet a complete sense of empathy would also hold space for the devastating pain of October 7th and how it shaped the perspectives of those who acted in defense of Israel.

This is where empathy meets listening, and where both become civic virtues. In a culture that promotes civil discourse, empathy is more than a feeling; it’s a discipline we must practice to allow ourselves to humanize those who disagree with us. The gospels teach that we are to love each other as ourselves, as if we shared a body together, and as if what you feel, I too in some way feel. That kind of love is not passive. It requires us to listen across differences, to sit with the discomfort of perspectives that unsettle our own, and to resist the temptation to dismiss what we haven’t yet tried to understand. Empathy, in this sense, is the foundation of deep listening, and deep listening is the foundation of democratic life.

The skills that make this possible — perspective-taking, active attention, the willingness to be changed by what we hear — are not mere instincts. They are practices. They can be learned, and they can be lost. Empathy does not require agreement. But empathy does require our love for our country to be reflected in our concern for our neighbors. Empathy requires us to take seriously the reality of the person across from us — their hopes, their fears, and the experiences that shape their convictions. That seriousness is what transforms a conversation into a community, and a community into a democracy.

Let this empathy be the substance of how we practice democracy.

Share

We invite you join our upcoming webinar, The Lost Art of Listening: Building Empathy Across Differences, with FAIR Advisors John Wood Jr. and Ilana Redstone, moderated by FAIR Executive Director Monica Harris, on Monday, April 27th, at 4pm PT / 7pm ET.

Register here

We welcome you to share your thoughts on this piece in the comments below. Click here to view our comment section moderation policy.

The opinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of Fair For All or its employees.

In keeping with our mission to promote a common culture of fairness, understanding, and humanity, we are committed to including a diverse range of voices and to encouraging compassionate, good-faith discourse.

We are actively seeking perspectives on this topic and others. If you’d like to join the conversation, please send completed drafts to submissions@fairforall.org.

Adolescence has always been one of the most biologically intense periods of human development. The brain is rapidly reorganizing, hormone systems are activating, and emotional processing pathways are maturing. Mood swings, heightened stress sensitivity, and difficulty regulating internal states are not signs of disorder; rather, they are features of a developing mind and body learning to adapt to their environment.

Yet increasingly, these normal developmental experiences are being pathologized. Antidepressant dispensing among adolescents and young adults ages 12–25 increased by 66.3% between 2016 and 2022, driven largely by rising prescriptions among female adolescents. ADHD diagnoses have surged to approximately 11.4% of U.S. children ages 3–17, more than 6 million children. Hormonal contraception is routinely prescribed to teenage girls not for pregnancy prevention but for acne, painful periods, or mood fluctuations. Research from the Guttmacher Institute found that about one-third report using it solely to manage these symptoms while 82% of birth control pill users report taking it for at least one non-contraceptive reason.

Medications can help. The question is whether they are being introduced before other physiological avenues have been explored and whether families are receiving the full picture before they consent.

The Developing Brain Needs Context

One reason adolescent symptoms are so easily mistaken for disorder is neurological timing. The limbic system — which processes emotions and reward — becomes highly active during puberty, while the prefrontal cortex — which governs impulse control and emotional regulation — does not fully mature until the mid-twenties. Adolescents are wired to experience strong emotional signals before the regulation systems to manage them are fully online. This is development, not disease, and it should be the starting point of every clinical conversation about adolescent behavioral and emotional symptoms.

Case One: When Treatment Shifts the Problem

A 12-year-old girl presented with severe anxiety and persistent insomnia. After several months, she was prescribed an SSRI. Her sleep improved; physiologically, this makes sense, as SSRIs increase serotonin availability, and serotonin is a biochemical precursor to melatonin, which regulates the sleep–wake cycle.

About a year later, however, her menstrual cycle stopped.

Serotonin signaling interacts closely with the hypothalamic pathways that regulate reproduction, and SSRIs have been associated with elevated prolactin levels, a hormone that can suppress ovulation. In adolescents, whose hormonal systems are still establishing their long-term rhythms, these interactions carry particular weight: disrupted ovulatory cycles can affect progesterone production and the development of peak bone mass, both critical processes during these years.

This case also opens a broader question about hormonal contraception, which is frequently prescribed to teenage girls presenting with these exact symptoms — irregular cycles, mood changes, acne — as a first-line response. Hormonal contraceptives work by suppressing ovulation and disrupting the brain-ovary signaling axis. Research has shown that women using oral contraceptives often exhibit altered cortisol regulation compared to non-users, reflecting changes in the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis that governs stress response, energy metabolism, and immune function. When ovulation is suppressed, the presenting symptom may improve while the underlying physiological imbalance continues unaddressed, and families are rarely told this is the trade-off.

For this patient, after addressing nutritional gaps — including B vitamins and magnesium, which play documented roles in neurotransmitter synthesis and hormonal regulation — her menstrual cycle eventually returned. But the original question was never fully answered: what physiological factors drove her anxiety and insomnia in the first place? Sleep quality, nutrient status, blood sugar regulation, and stress physiology all influence how the developing brain responds to its environment. These were not part of the initial clinical conversation.

Case Two: When Environment Is Diagnosed as Disorder

A 12-year-old boy was referred for ADHD evaluation after parents and school staff reported difficulty focusing, high physical energy, and an inability to sit still. Stimulant medication was recommended.

A review of his daily routine told a different story: most of his day was spent sitting in class, in front of a computer, or watching television. He had almost no opportunity for sustained physical movement.

Neurologically, this matters. Movement generates sensory input from muscles, joints, and the inner ear that helps regulate the brain’s attention and stress response systems. Physical activity stimulates dopamine production, increases brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), and improves blood flow to prefrontal regions involved in focus and learning. When children spend most of the day sedentary, the brain receives far less of this regulatory input.

Compounding this, the high-intensity digital stimulation this child experienced through video games, and social media, strongly activates dopamine pathways. Over time, the brain adapts by reducing receptor sensitivity through a process called downregulation. Everyday tasks like reading or sitting in a classroom then feel comparatively under-stimulating. This is not necessarily a disorder. It may be a mismatch between environment and neurology.

Stimulant medications address the symptom by increasing dopamine and norepinephrine signaling, but they also activate the sympathetic nervous system and increase cortisol output. For a developing brain that depends on adequate sleep, nutrition, and movement, the downstream effects of appetite suppression, sleep disruption, and altered reward pathway sensitivity can create new challenges even as they resolve the presenting one. Some patients require dosage escalation as the brain adapts, a pattern that warrants honest conversation with families upfront.

Instead of beginning medication, we increased physical activity, introduced regular movement breaks, improved sleep hygiene, reduced screen exposure, and adjusted nutrition. Within weeks, his focus improved significantly.

Informed Consent Means More Than a Doctor’s Signature

Clinicians have an obligation to give families the full picture before a prescription is written. Medicine calls this informed consent. But in adolescent psychiatry and primary care, the standard is too often applied narrowly, covering immediate benefits and common short-term side effects while leaving out the broader physiological context in which these medications operate.

Families deserve to know that SSRIs interact with reproductive hormone pathways. That stimulant medications alter developing reward systems and may require escalation over time. That hormonal contraception changes cortisol regulation and stress physiology in ways not fully reversible on a predictable timeline. These are not fringe concerns. They are documented in the peer-reviewed literature, and they are relevant to any family weighing a prescription for a child whose brain and endocrine systems are still under construction.

Equally important, families deserve to know what has not been evaluated before a prescription is written. Has this child’s sleep been assessed? Their nutrient status? Their physical activity levels? The degree of chronic stress in their environment? When these factors go unexamined, medication may relieve a symptom while leaving the underlying physiology unchanged or introducing new disruptions into systems that are still developing.

The time constraints of modern clinical practice make these conversations difficult. But that difficulty is a systemic problem that should not be resolved at the patient’s expense, especially when the patient is twelve years old.

Rethinking What We Owe Adolescents

None of this argues against medication when it is genuinely warranted. There are situations where pharmaceutical intervention is appropriate and even necessary for suicidal ideation, severe depression, psychosis, or debilitating anxiety that significantly impairs a young person’s ability to function. That threshold exists for good reason.

But many of the symptoms that bring adolescents into medical offices — difficulty focusing, mood fluctuations, sleep disturbances, menstrual discomfort, irritability — are also features of normal neurological and hormonal development. Adolescence is not a disease. Treating it as one, without first exploring the physiological context, does a disservice to patients and families alike.

Before reaching for a prescription, families deserve the opportunity to ask deeper questions:

• Is their child sleeping well?

• Are they moving their body regularly?

• Are they receiving the nutrients their developing brain requires?

• Are underlying stressors being identified and addressed?

Symptoms are not always signs of disorder. Sometimes they are signals from a developing body that needs support and an invitation for clinicians to look more carefully before writing a prescription.

Share

We invite you join us for a webinar with Dr. Kendra Kautz on Wednesday, May 6th, at 7pm ET, for Part 2 in our series on The Mind-Body Connection: Rethinking How Medicine Approaches Adolescent Development.

Register Here

We welcome you to share your thoughts on this piece in the comments below. Click here to view our comment section moderation policy.

The opinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of Fair For All or its employees.

In keeping with our mission to promote a common culture of fairness, understanding, and humanity, we are committed to including a diverse range of voices and to encouraging compassionate, good-faith discourse.

We are actively seeking perspectives on this topic and others. If you’d like to join the conversation, please send completed drafts to submissions@fairforall.org.

In Invasion of the Body Snatchers, alien pods overtake people one by one. Each person looks the same but something essential is missing: warmth, individuality, and the emotional presence that makes human connection possible.

Identity politics can captivate minds in a similar manner. Intelligent, well-meaning people with common-sense can be misguided by the rigid framework of “us-against-them;” “oppressor vs. oppressed.” This ideology foments dehumanizing trait categorization, flattens identity, and heightens division.

All of us are vulnerable to collapsing our ideas into ideology, and it appears across the political spectrum. It’s deeply concerning when politicians practice such divisiveness. It’s an abdication of authority when “experts” promote activism. It’s sad when it affects personal relationships. But it’s especially damaging when it enters psychotherapy —a field entrusted with expanding, rather than constricting human understanding. Therapists should be working to simultaneously enhance the better angels of our nature and our culture’s nobler aspects, like the sanctity of individual character.

As I’ve written elsewhere, the confusion begins with the misuse of the word “culture.” Properly understood, culture is a rich tableau through which we grasp and express meaning, and transmit it to the next generation. It includes “high-culture” — art, literature, ritual -– but also involves countless everyday practices that express values just as powerfully: how parents teach children right from wrong, how families resolve conflicts, and how disagreements are handled within communities. Attending to such things carefully is central to good clinical work.

However, “culture” is increasingly becoming equated with identity politics and reduced to immutable identity characteristics such as race. When this happens, culture becomes an over simplified, one-dimensional lens that emphasizes group differences while obscuring individual variation. This is not culture in its full sense, but a diminished version of it.

Many clinicians feel that cultural and political tensions have become pervasive and difficult to navigate. Psychologist Jon Haidt says that, since 2012 or so, we’ve been in a period that’s “Uniquely Structurally Stupid.” I agree and propose that identity politics ideology is a structural part of the problem, (mis)guiding all of society and making it difficult to address ideas intelligently, issue by issue. The ideology is a framework, and as long as the framework remains intact, the individual battles are endless and exhausting.

To address the “Structural Stupidity” problem we must build “Structural Intelligence.” Until we have a structure that is flexible, reciprocal, deep and generative, no efforts will make lasting gains. Psychotherapy once placed greater emphasis on “character structure” — exploring personal psychological patterns with nuance, depth, thoughtfulness, and relational awareness. We must revisit this kind of structural thinking in order to help restore balance in how we approach culture, identity, and meaning in clinical work.

People alienated by identity politics and “the culture wars” often feel demoralized, and the field of psychotherapy, like much in the West, has systematically hollowed out its moral sensibilities. People feel demoralized in the ordinary sense: discouraged, exhausted, and unsure how to respond. But they have also been “de-moralized” in a deeper sense; stripped of the moral language and moral confidence they need to push back. And this is particularly an issue in the field of psychotherapy, where clinicians may find themselves hesitant to engage moral questions at all even when they are central to a patient’s experience.

In contrast, identity politics activists are intensely moralistic. Narratives of critical social justice: white supremacy, colonial oppression, patriarchy, and the like, are delivered with intense moral alarm. If clinicians fail to recognize or accept the moralized terms and tone, then any amount of reason, evidence and civic principles risk being blown away in the moralistic bluster. In fact, a calm tone could be received as dismissive, for implicitly failing to acknowledge the fiery heat of the grievances.

Psychotherapy needs to meet the moral moment. Though our field used to be populated by priests and shamans, the spiritual and moral aspects of our work have been largely stripped away. Some of us are religious believers, but one needn’t be religious to remember that “psyche” actually means “soul.” It’s to our detriment that the values-based, soulful, or spirit-aspects of mental life, identity and relationships have been expelled. This is a major error, and one that must be remedied without sinking into moralism, reactivity, or tribalism. Haidt’s Moral Foundations Theory offers one possible framework for rebuilding “structural intelligence” in a balanced and clinically relevant way.

It becomes clear how urgently we must act when we see how identity politics actually distorts clinical work in practice. When politics overrides clinical reality it’s the patients we seek to heal who suffer most.

In one case, a group of colleagues working with Spanish monolingual immigrant families were (at first) clear eyed about the challenges in this community. They spent years decrying clients’ predatory family members who crossed the southern border, often gang members and repeat criminals. They lamented the pattern of those family members being deported only to return again and again, menacing the community and the families we treated. That ended with the 2016 election, when a 180-degree reversal occurred, and those same colleagues suddenly talked in lockstep about how “horrible” it was to enforce immigration laws. Patients suffered as a result, as did the clinical work and thinking required to help these families in truly dangerous, often vexing situations. The ideology had invaded.

In another case, a treatment team struggled to properly engage with a situation involving a mother who repeatedly attempted to murder her young daughter (and who had herself been abused by her mother as a child). People like this woman need their violent tendencies recognized and dealt with properly. However, due to the identity politics framework which views all women as “oppressed” and men as “oppressors,” care-provider attention remained focused on the child’s absent father whose behavior, while relevant, did not represent the most immediate danger. Instead, pre-existing assumptions about gender roles shaped clinical care in ways that limited responsiveness to the actual circumstances.

These examples are not about assigning blame. They illustrate how pre-formed narratives — of any kind — can narrow perception and interfere with careful clinical judgment. Therapists must remain attentive to clinical patterns of emotion and behavior, without relying on oversimplified identity-based narratives.

Developing more structurally intelligent approaches to culture and morality is both possible and necessary. That’s why I have partnered with FAIR to create a Continuing Education course that invites participants to explore frameworks that support deeper understanding, richer clinical thinking, and greater openness to the moral, cultural, and even soulful dimensions of psychotherapy.

Whether you’re a practicing clinician struggling to navigate cultural issues authentically, a trainer concerned about ideological constraints in professional education, or just someone committed to finding a more humane and effective approach to psychological practice, I invite you to join me and other FAIR-minded mental health workers to explore these ideas live on April 8th, or at your convenience through pre-recorded Home Study available now through April 18th.

The task is ambitious and cannot be completed in a single session. But developing a clearer outline and a shared language for these challenges is an important step forward.

Register for Wednesday, April 8th
Register for Home Study

Share

We welcome you to share your thoughts on this piece in the comments below. Click here to view our comment section moderation policy.

The opinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of Fair For All or its employees.

In keeping with our mission to promote a common culture of fairness, understanding, and humanity, we are committed to including a diverse range of voices and to encouraging compassionate, good-faith discourse.

We are actively seeking perspectives on this topic and others. If you’d like to join the conversation, please send drafts to submissions@fairforall.org.

At the start of 2025, I followed an intriguing link in a Substack article that sent me tumbling, Alice-like, through cyberspace, eventually depositing me on FAIR’s home page. Two clicks later, I felt my eyes well up in gratitude: I had found FAIR in the Arts.

I didn’t know it yet, but this discovery would lead me to re-imagine a new kind of theatre. Actually, it wasn’t “new,” it was the theatre I’d always known and loved: open, accepting, resilient, playful... and dedicated not to individual differences or political preferences, but to creating plays that help us remember our collective humanity.

It may sound like hyperbole, but when I found FAIR, I cried. Yes, my friends will tell you I cry easily—but these tears were hard-won. I had finally found an organization that recognized the unspoken challenges I had faced as a theatre artist since 2020.

Before the world shut down that year, I was gaining traction within the Buffalo, NY theatre world as a director and playwright. I had been hired to work on projects. I had made friends. I had created a writer’s group.

After the world shut down, I hunkered down like everyone else. I took the opportunity of solitude to write a massive play in Elizabethan prose and iambic pentameter about Aemilia Lanier, a possible author of Shakespeare’s works. Every two weeks I brought a few more scenes to the writer’s group, now on Zoom like every other writer’s group during that time.

By 2021 I had finished a first draft, and asked one of my newish theatre friends (I’ll call her Sally) to direct a table read. She said yes, and we worked out the details. I suggested we do the reading outdoors at a park to free everyone from masks. I told her I didn’t want to see my play read by a bunch of faceless actors, and she agreed: too much would be lost.

What I didn’t say was that I didn’t want to wear a mask indoors myself.

Two weeks before the date, Sally contacted me. “I checked out the park. I don’t think it’s going to work — there’s just too much ambient noise, and what if it rains?”

Before I could think of a helpful response, she continued: “But I have great news! I contacted a theatre, and they’re happy to let us use their space! I’ve booked it for the same time and date.”

Stunned, all I could do was thank her and hang up. Sure enough, within the hour, there was an email in my inbox to all of us, explaining the venue change and including something like: “Since we will be indoors, please wear a mask if you’re unvaccinated. I’m sure we all have loved ones we want to protect.”

My heart raced. I was stuck. If I wore a mask, I’d be telegraphing to ten theatre people whom I had worked so hard to befriend that I was NOT ONE OF THEM. If I didn’t wear it, I’d be pretending I was vaccinated.

The day loomed. I didn’t know what to do. I was losing sleep every night, trying to figure out the “right” thing to do.

On the day of, I still didn’t know. I decided to trust my instincts to do what felt right. I knew I wasn’t sick, so that was a plus. I drove to the theatre, parked, and carried in a case of water, sweating profusely all the way.

At the door, Sally greeted me warmly and welcomed me in, keeping her distance. And that was that. I didn’t put on a mask. I didn’t say anything about it. As the other actors arrived, I did the same as Sally — a warm hello, from afar.

It felt lousy.

I had never done that before. I had always spoken up — gently, usually — to share my opinion, even when it was not the prevailing ideology. But this time I caved. I disregarded my integrity, choosing to preserve my working relationship with these people by pretending I shared their beliefs, and all I felt… was sheepishness.

In the end, though, that attempt to “preserve my working relationship” didn’t matter. As the year wore on, I was denied access to all theatres due to my personal health choices. Not only could I not work in any theatre, I couldn’t even set foot inside one.

All the communities that had embraced me – the Waldorf School where I had sent all three children and worked three years as the Administrator/Principal, the yoga studio where I taught, and yes, the theatre community – suddenly felt foreign. Feeling strange, separate, and othered, I faded away from all of them, quietly, with no explanation or remonstrance.

Somewhere in the back of my mind I thought it would all blow over. These communities would soon reach back out, surely, with some version of “We kind of went overboard, sorry, that’ll never happen again. Where’ve you been?”

But that mea culpa never came.

My husband and I debated endlessly: stay or go? Eventually, we lost whatever faith we had left that New York State would operate in our best interests. By October of 2022, we knew what we had to do. As difficult as it was to leave both my sister and the home where my husband and I had raised our three children, we packed up the house and moved to Florida.

There, emboldened by living in an entirely new place, I launched The Art of Freedom, a Substack publication dedicated to freedom in all realms: artistic, individual, collective, and divine. I came to think of myself as an unlabeled, open-minded skeptic who follows the truth wherever it leads, and endeavored to mirror that evolution within my ‘stack, creating a place where readers of any ideology would feel welcome. Through it, I slowly forged an online community that became a lifeline.

The one gaping hole in my life? Theatre. I had no idea how to muster up the courage to get involved again.

Fast-forward to 2025, as I was weeping upon the discovery of “FAIR in the Arts.” I scrolled down the page… and there it was: “Playwright’s Think Tank.” (What the ?!?) I guffawed. A group of playwrights dedicated to discussing works “without the influence of social/political/theological trends, group-think, and personal bias”? Was I dreaming?

I fired off an email to the Playwright’s Think Tank (PTT), sharing my story and desire to be part of a writer’s group again. The facilitator kindly invited me to a meeting the following evening… and I’ve been a member of the open-minded group ever since.

Courage is a funny thing. Just as moving to FL emboldened me to speak up via The Art of Freedom, joining the PTT six months ago gave me the fortitude to reach out to theatres here in the Tampa/St. Pete area. I’m happy to report that opportunities have blossomed.

What I’ve discovered is that bravery is contagious. The playwrights of PTT do not all agree with one another on much of anything, but they speak their minds freely and send their works out into the world, regardless of the reception. And regularly sharing the company of such people has strengthened my resolve to do the same.

My desire to self-censor is all but gone. Now, when fellow theatre artists make political comments that assume consensus on a multitude of topics, I rarely default into, “Why jeopardize these burgeoning relationships?” Instead, I act from, “I’ll bet we can agree on at least some part of this issue.”

Instinctive, preemptive self-muzzling is what I see as the greatest threat to the arts, specifically within the theatre community. Based on my own experience and that of fellow PTT members and other Substackers who left the theatre, I know I’m not alone.

And this is why I was driven to create “Dear US: One-Acts to Bridge the Divide.” I wanted to produce an evening of differing viewpoints within the physical theatre itself, to cultivate thought-freedom in the place that believes it’s fighting for those very freedoms – even as it suppresses them through an assumption of monoculture. I wanted to help others in the theatre community develop the courage that slowly takes root when you’re surrounded by those who speak their minds.

Joining PTT gave me the resolve to rejoin the world of theatre, and hearing about FAIR in the Arts’ grant opportunity sparked some serious goosebumps— which I pay close attention to. Sure enough, the idea for “Dear US” soon fell into my heart.

After years of waiting for the theatre to “take me back,” I realized something: it’s up to me to create the kind of theatre I’m yearning for — a place where everyone is welcome, and the free exchange of ideas is a given.

I have always been a bridge-builder, a person who facilitates connection in the midst of conflict, who reaches for consensus rather than majority domination.

I’m still committed to building bridges, even at this time of our human evolution when it seems that almost everyone else is burning them down. My mission has always been to invite black and white to step toward each other into grey, and with FAIR’s help in the form of this grant, I’m doing just that.

Share

For more information about the Playwright’s Think Tank, please contact karen.howes@fairforall.org

We welcome you to share your thoughts on this piece in the comments below. Click here to view our comment section moderation policy. 

The opinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of Fair For All or its employees.

In keeping with our mission to promote a common culture of fairness, understanding, and humanity, we are committed to including a diverse range of voices and to encouraging compassionate, good-faith discourse.

We are actively seeking perspectives on this topic and others. If you’d like to join the conversation, please send drafts to submissions@fairforall.org.

As a physician, my world was defined by the sanctity of the individual: the quiet, sacred space between a doctor and a patient where human dignity and the preservation of life reigned supreme. My professional life was governed by a singular, sacred commitment: the Hippocratic Oath. This wasn’t just a formality; it was a prescription for a healthy society, rooted in the primacy of the individual and the objective pursuit of scientific truth. I believed that by defending ethical standards in my beloved profession, I was holding the line for Western civilization.

But then the world changed in 2020. The pandemic didn’t just bring a virus; it brought a mirror. As I watched the medical establishment succumb to a suffocating groupthink and a “mob-like” dismissal of heterodox thought, I realized that the rot wasn’t just in the clinics. It was in the marrow of our society. The same ideological forces destroying the sanctity of medicine were already hard at work destroying the minds of the next generation in our K-12 schools.

I realized I could no longer just be a doctor. As a mom, I had to become an advocate for the very foundation of our future: our children.

The Echoes of a Soviet Past

My perspective is not merely academic; it is ancestral. I am a Soviet Jew. My DNA carries the memory of what happens when a society abandons the individual in favor of the collective, and when “the greater good” becomes a justification for dehumanization and violence.

To me, Jewish values are not separate from Western civilization; they are the pillars of it. The emphasis on questioning, the pursuit of objective truth, and the infinite value of a single human life are what built the modern world. When I see the terrifying rise of Jew-hatred in our streets and our schools today, I don’t see a random flare-up of bigotry. I see a direct, coordinated attack on American values. History has shown us that Jews are the “canary in the coal mine” when a society begins to hunt the Jew, it has already begun to eat itself.

From the Nazi Era to the Modern Classroom

The turning point in my transformation from medical advocate to education defender occurred during a webinar I hosted for FAIR titled “Health Professionals in the Nazi Era.” Preparing for that presentation was a chilling experience. I saw with terrifying clarity how the most “educated” professionals of the 1930s, doctors and teachers, were the first to succumb to ideological capture. They didn’t wake up one day as monsters; they were slowly conditioned to prioritize activism over their professional oaths.

I looked at our current K-12 landscape and saw the same patterns. As depicted in the documentary Killing America by Eli Steele, the erosion of merit and the introduction of “social justice” frameworks in schools like those in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I grew up and raised my own kids, mirrored the lowering of medical standards I had fought against. Whether it is lowering the bar for a medical degree or removing honors math for eighth graders, the result is the same: the sacrifice of excellence at the altar of ideology. Unnecessary suffering inevitably follows.

The Neurology of Hate

When my grandfather, Srul, passed away in 2022, just 4 months shy of 101, something broke and reset within me. He was a man who survived the unimaginable, a living link to a world that tried to erase him. After his death, I knew I couldn’t stay silent. I realized that while I was treating patients for neurological disorders, a different kind of pathology was being wired into the brains of millions of children.

As a neurologist, I understand how the brain learns. I know that the neuroplasticity of a child is a gift that can be easily exploited. When schools replace actual education with social justice activism, they are quite literally wiring tribalism and resentment into the developing mind. They are teaching children to see color before character, and power dynamics before humanity. This isn’t just bad teaching; it is unintentional neurological injury to a generation of humans.

A New Oath

I am often asked why a Parkinson’s Disease doctor is so involved in school board battles and curriculum transparency activism. My answer is simple: I am still practicing medicine.

In medicine, we say Primum non nocere - First, do no harm. By allowing our education system to replace the pursuit of truth with ideological indoctrination, we are doing profound, perhaps irreversible, harm to the individual and, inevitably, to society at large.

I have moved from defending the Hippocratic Oath to defending the classroom because the battle is the same. It is a battle for the soul of the West. It is a battle to ensure that no child is ever taught that their worth is defined by their group identity, and that no doctor is ever forced to choose a narrative over a patient. For my grandfather, for my children, and for the country that gave my family refuge, I will not be silent.

Share

We welcome you to share your thoughts on this piece in the comments below. Click here to view our comment section moderation policy. 

The opinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of Fair For All or its employees.

In keeping with our mission to promote a common culture of fairness, understanding, and humanity, we are committed to including a diverse range of voices and to encouraging compassionate, good-faith discourse.

We are actively seeking perspectives on this topic and others. If you’d like to join the conversation, please send drafts to submissions@fairforall.org.

One of the reasons I like Black History Month is its showcase and celebration of the triumphs of black people in the United States from slavery, through Jim Crow, to recent history. These triumphs not only show how resilient figures in black history have been, but also how resilient black Americans can be right now. These historical figures represent the potential of contemporary figures. That said, both black and non-black Americans insist that sufficient representation of black American success is still somehow lacking. For me, that has not been the case. Though Mary Wright Edelman’s claim that “You can’t be what you can’t see” has been widely embraced, I think that embrace is both misguided and a slap in the face of those black leaders who came before us.

When people try to convince me of the importance of demographic representation in professional spaces, I always reply similarly. “Yes,” I say, “ I always make sure another black person is in a restaurant before I walk in.” When they nod in approval, I add, “Before I order the prime rib at a restaurant, I have to make sure I see another black person eating it first.” After they realize my facetiousness, I add, “If I don’t see a black man eating the prime rib, I just point to another black person in the restaurant and say to the waiter‘I’ll have what he’s having.” Clearly, this is a roundabout way of saying the concept of representation is overstated. Yes, I know the need for representation is a real thing for people. My question is, “Should it be?” Is the need for racial representation something to be satisfied, or is it something to be overcome?

I understand the appeal of representation to an extent, especially when it comes to shaping young minds during formative years. For such young minds, racial representation in professional spaces expands their perceived possibilities for future livelihood, reduces what identity-based uncertainty that may have been instilled in them, and effectively signals viable pursuits and belonging. I get that. It’s why I say representation is “overrated” and not just useless.

However, I believe the importance and efficacy of racial representation loses its usefulness after a while, the way training wheels lose their usefulness when a child learns to ride a bike without them. As far as I see it, after a certain age, representation is more of a crutch than anything else. One detriment of this crutch is the demand to see black people in particular fields because they themselves are interested in pursuing that field. But this is a flawed take.

When I was a child, I didn’t need to see black people succeed in a particular field. I needed to see black people succeed, period. When I saw a successful black professional, I knew that I could be a successful black professional as well, not successful in a particular field, just successful. I didn’t need to see a black professor before entering graduate school to earn my Ph.D. In my mind, “successful black professor” was a subcategory of “successful black professional.” All I needed was to see success, and I saw enough to make me think I could be successful too.

What’s more, the need for representation is a self-defeating concept. Somebody has to be the first minority in a field to serve as the initial representation. If every black person needed to see representation in a certain field, they would never get representatives in that field. Someone has to take the first step. Why can’t it be you?

In The Content of Our Character, Shelby Steele coined the term “integration shock,” which is the reluctance of black people to enter white spaces after the Civil Rights Movement, a reluctance born of both fear and unfamiliarity. I think this was understandable in the years following the end of the movement, but I believe the perpetuation of a victim narrative—which provided many rhetorical and political benefits—has kept this concept alive. The need for representation is a symptom of integration shock, which is a byproduct of victimhood.

I am of the mind that the best way to honor black Americans who came before us, who certainly did not have the representation many black people feel they need to move ahead, is to thwart the need to see ourselves in particular professional spaces. What did those black heroes fight for? What is the point of putting all that time and energy into opening doors of opportunity if no one is willing to walk through them? For what did they endure physical, mental, and emotional pain if we’re just going to act like we have it as bad as they did? The need for representation is a sacrilege for two reasons: it downplays the triumphs of black history and shows that black resilience may have weakened when the whole point was to strengthen it.

I plan on honoring the black intellectuals, heroes, and leaders of American history by walking through whatever doors I want, aspiring to whichever goals I want, and focusing on the present and future they fought so hard to give me. Anything else makes a celebration of black history into a mockery of black history.

Share

We welcome you to share your thoughts on this piece in the comments below. Click here to view our comment section moderation policy. 

The opinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of Fair For All or its employees.

In keeping with our mission to promote a common culture of fairness, understanding, and humanity, we are committed to including a diverse range of voices and to encouraging compassionate, good-faith discourse.

We are actively seeking other perspectives on this topic and others. If you’d like to join the conversation, please send drafts to submissions@fairforall.org.

You may have heard about increasing calls for library book bans from members of the public. What you may not have heard is that the number of library staff members quietly banning books behind the scenes is increasing.

More than 10,000 books were removed from the H.B. Beal Secondary School Library in London, Ontario, between January and March of 2025, and two years earlier, all books published before 2008 were removed from Peel District School Board libraries (also in Ontario). These book purges were initiated by school and library staff, not by citizens demanding censorship.

The threat of ideological influence within library collections is not new. Since the late 1960s, some library professionals have increasingly seen their role not only as stewards of intellectual freedom but also as agents of social change. A 2022 article in the Journal of Intellectual Freedom & Privacy Journal of Intellectual Freedom & Privacy describes this shift: “If a postwar centrist consensus ever existed within American librarianship, it shattered in the late 1960s in ways that parallel political developments in the country at large.” These librarians reject the profession’s core principles of neutrality and viewpoint diversity in a quest to make society more equitable. This quest has made librarians some of the most prolific censors.

Despite censorship within the profession, librarians celebrate themselves as intellectual freedom fighters every year during Freedom to Read Week in Canada (Feb 22 – 28, 2026) and Banned Books Week in the United States (October 4 – 10, 2026). Both events feature condemnation of book banners and lists of the most banned and challenged books.

While book challenges have recently increased and become more organized, few result in books being pulled from shelves. What Freedom to Read Week and Banned Books Week fail to acknowledge are books that never make it to the shelves because library staff disagree with the content.

“A truly great library has something to offend everyone”, was wisely stated by Jo Godwin, librarian and final editor of the Wilson Library Bulletin, and Ms. Godwin is right. Everyone, including library staff, has the right to be offended but not the right to censor.

Library staff are entitled to their opinions, but must not let these opinions influence what’s on the shelves. Intellectual freedom is only possible when library collections are neutral and offer multiple viewpoints.

David Berninghausen defended library neutrality as chair of the American Library Association (ALA) Intellectual Freedom Committee from 1948 to 1952 and 1967 to 1972. Berninghausen witnessed censorship attacks from the right during the Cold War communism scare and from the left during the 1960s social revolution. His book, The Flight from Reason: Essays on Intellectual Freedom in the Academy, the Press, and the Library, gives readers a sense of déjà vu. We’ve been here before and seen the threat to intellectual freedom when educators and librarians believe only their views are correct and alternate views must be suppressed.

The good news is that more librarians are speaking up about the insider threat to intellectual freedom. In 2023, librarians from across North America began discussing an alternative to existing associations that were pushing the profession towards divisive social activism. The Association of Library Professionals (ALP’s) mission is to uphold neutrality, open inquiry, individual liberty, freedom of thought, speech, and intellectual freedom. The ALP also recognizes the role libraries play in children's healthy development and advocates for age-appropriate books and parental guidance.

FAIR in Libraries (FiL) was also formed to uphold traditional library values and includes members from across North America. FiL focuses on empowering library users, parents, and educators with the support and tools they need to ensure their library remains neutral and offers multiple viewpoints.

Ultimately, intellectual freedom depends not on slogans or awareness weeks, but on consistent commitment to neutrality in practice. Libraries serve the entire public, not a single ideology, political movement, or cultural moment. When collections reflect genuine viewpoint diversity, communities gain the opportunity to think critically, engage respectfully with disagreement, and make informed decisions for themselves. Protecting that balance requires vigilance from librarians, stakeholders, and patrons alike. A truly free library is not one that tells people what to think, but one that trusts them enough to explore ideas openly and decide for themselves.

Share

We welcome you to share your thoughts on this piece in the comments below. Click here to view our comment section moderation policy. 

The opinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of Fair For All or its employees.

In keeping with our mission to promote a common culture of fairness, understanding, and humanity, we are committed to including a diverse range of voices and to encouraging compassionate, good-faith discourse.

We are actively seeking other perspectives on this topic and others. If you’d like to join the conversation, please send drafts to submissions@fairforall.org.

If you’ve had the pleasure of reading Jefferson Shupe’s YA novel The Bathwater Brigade, you may remember the scene with a group of college students who set up a table on their campus to celebrate how far America has come on race—a timeline from slavery through emancipation, civil rights, and the election of a Black president, with an arrow pointing to the words “More progress to be made!” Red, white, and blue cupcakes complete the display. Next to the table, two students start arguing about a local police shooting of an unarmed Black man. One insists the officer had no choice. The other can’t believe anyone would defend it. They trade statistics, grievances, and accusations—neither asking a genuine question nor acknowledging the other might have a legitimate concern. It ends with the table tipped over, cupcakes destroyed, and no common ground found.

It’s a scene that plays out daily across American campuses—and increasingly in high schools, on social media, and at family dinner tables. By the time students reach college, habits of adversarial argument are deeply entrenched. What if we could equip young people with better tools earlier?

This question drove Fair for All to develop the American Experience Curriculum—an ethnic studies course that prepares high school students for constructive engagement in America’s pluralistic democracy. Students develop deep civic knowledge and sophisticated civil discourse skills by exploring diverse American experiences—centering historically marginalized voices and the unique challenges various groups have faced alongside the contributions each has made—while also studying the constitutional principles and democratic processes that form our shared civic foundations. The curriculum recognizes that successful democracy requires both honoring diverse experiences and building shared commitments; these foundations create a stable framework for productive disagreement about how to apply principles and address ongoing barriers to participation. Central to this approach is a progression: from the destructive (straw- manning) to the respectful (steel-manning) to the transformative (star-manning).

The Spectrum of Argumentation

Straw-manning is what many of us default to—reducing someone’s argument to its weakest form to make it easier to attack. “So you think cops should just shoot Black people?” It feels satisfying, but you haven’t engaged with their real position. You’ve created an enemy instead of finding understanding.

Steel-manning is the opposite—presenting the strongest possible version of someone’s position before responding. “You believe the officer faced a split-second decision with incomplete information, and we shouldn’t judge without understanding that fear and uncertainty.” The goal: articulate their argument so well that they say, “Yup, that’s right!” This demonstrates respect and opens the door to genuine dialogue.

But there’s still something missing. Steel-manning addresses the argument—but what about the person making it?

Enter star-manning, a concept created by Angel Eduardo, Chair of Fair for All’s Board of Directors. Eduardo coined the term in 2021, inspired by David Bowie’s “Starman.” Star-manning goes beyond engaging with the strongest version of an argument to engaging with the most charitable version of the person, acknowledging their good intentions and shared desires despite your disagreements.

Returning to our debate: a steel man might say, “You believe this shooting reflects a broader pattern where Black Americans face disproportionate use of force, and that better training could save lives.” A star man goes further: “I can see you care deeply about human lives and want encounters between police and citizens to end without harm or loss of life.”

As Eduardo explains:

“The vast majority of us want the same things; our disagreement is always in the details. To star-man is to use this bedrock of commonality as a place from which to build good faith. We can now argue in truly good faith because we recognize not only our opponent’s arguments, but their humanity.”

The progression from straw to steel to star represents a journey from contempt to respect to compassion.

Teaching These Skills Through Ethnic Studies and American History

The American Experience Curriculum doesn’t teach civil discourse as a standalone unit. Rather, it is integrated throughout. The decision to make civil discourse central to this curriculum was inspired by Shupe’s novel. As lead curriculum developer, I integrated Shupe’s civil discourse contributions and Angel Eduardo’s star manning concept, along with a variety of other proven civil discourse methods, progressively across all nine units, ensuring students build skills from low-stakes practice to complex application.

Students begin with accessible scenarios—debates about phones in class and school start times—then apply the same skills to increasingly challenging historical and contemporary issues. Basic skills are introduced in Unit 1, establishing the foundation: active listening, distinguishing civility from politeness, steel-manning, and star-manning opposing viewpoints. Units 2-3 develop intermediate skills, such as identifying logical fallacies, applying the competing goods framework, and practicing historical empathy rather than presentism.

As students advance through Units 4-7, they master advanced skills: using Shupe’s SLEW Framework to genuinely understand different viewpoints; applying his “swap variables” technique to test whether their positions are principled; visualizing through the “Plinko Effect” how people with shared values can reach different conclusions based on small differences in how they weight those values; and finding “hidden third options” beyond binary thinking. Unit wrap-ups develop synthesis skills—strategic complementarity, coalition building, and learning to ask “when are both sides right?” rather than “which side is right?” Finally, the capstone project challenges students to apply all of these skills to digital communication through platforms and projects.

Here are a few examples to show how it works:

In Unit 3, students engage in a mock Constitutional Convention, arguing positions they may personally oppose. Through this exercise, students practice perspective-taking and role-playing across differences by representing different constituencies—including those excluded from the actual Convention. They develop collaborative problem-solving skills as they grapple with the same tensions the founders faced: balancing competing interests and forming unions across deep differences. The simulation also introduces ethical reasoning about compromise, challenging students to consider whether compromise on fundamental questions of human dignity can ever be justified.

In Unit 4, students explore the abolition movement’s strategic debates. Through steel-manning exercises and star-manning exercises, they discover that Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison shared the same goal: ending slavery. Yet they reached different conclusions about whether the Constitution could deliver freedom. By practicing these skills, students learn to distinguish between disagreements over methods and disagreements over values, recognizing that even people who agree on goals can disagree profoundly on how to achieve them.

In Unit 6, students synthesize their learning through the “Plinko Effect.” After examining how diverse groups—European immigrants, African Americans, women suffragists, Japanese Americans, and Mexican Americans—each pursued full citizenship between 1914 and 1945, students visualize how “small differences at the top create big differences at the bottom.” This lesson reinforces suspending judgment, recognizing shared values beneath surface disagreements, and applying charitable interpretation.

In Unit 7, students examine competing civil rights strategies. Using the “When Are Both Sides Right?” framework—a structured approach for identifying legitimate concerns across perspectives—they discover that Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and other leaders shared fundamental American ideals. Students practice charitable interpretation, learning to see strategic differences as reasonable responses to shared challenges rather than evidence of opposing values.

In Unit 8, students tackle contemporary debates about affirmative action, immigration, and criminal justice. A DACA stakeholder simulation places students in roles representing Dreamers, business coalitions, legal immigrants, and rule-of-law advocates—each with legitimate concerns. Through this exercise, students practice perspective-taking by representing positions they may not personally hold, steel and star-manning to understand competing stakeholders, and collaborative problem-solving through structured negotiation to find common ground.

An Inoculant Against Unproductive Discourse

Angel Eduardo calls star manning “an inoculant against our venomous discourse.” His six words of advice capture the spirit of what we’re trying to build: “Be kind; we’re all first drafts.”

We don’t have to wait for the next generation to discover better ways to disagree. The American Experience Curriculum is designed to teach students that understanding someone doesn’t mean agreeing with them, but that democracy requires genuinely grappling with opposing perspectives rather than dismissing them.

When I read Shupe’s novel about students bridging divides, I imagined what could be possible. My hope is that students who participate in this curriculum won’t only learn about the diverse experiences of all Americans and our shared history but will also build the habits of mind our democracy desperately needs: the ability to see ideological opponents as people, disagreements as opportunities, and common ground as something worth finding.

Share

We welcome you to share your thoughts on this piece in the comments below. Click here to view our comment section moderation policy. 

The opinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of Fair For All or its employees.

In keeping with our mission to promote a common culture of fairness, understanding, and humanity, we are committed to including a diverse range of voices and to encouraging compassionate, good-faith discourse.

We are actively seeking other perspectives on this topic and others. If you’d like to join the conversation, please send drafts to submissions@fairforall.org.

FAIR in Medicine is dedicated to supporting the scientific method, viewpoint diversity, and rigorous inquiry in the search for objective truth. We believe that intolerance is the enemy of free and open inquiry and respectful scientific debate. FAIR's advocacy for the rights of biological women and girls in sports and other protected spaces is premised on the need for objective scientific truth, but we also recognize the need to advocate for rigorous scientific inquiry beyond issues relating to gender.

As part of this effort, FAIR is launching a two-part series that will examine how nutrition impacts adult mental health. This essay is the first in that series. In Part II, we will explore how these patterns often occur within adolescence, a period of rapid brain, metabolic, and hormonal development. If this topic interests you, please join us on February 4th at 7pm ET for a webinar discussion with Dr. Kautz.

Going forward, we will explore other areas in which scientific debate and inquiry have been stifled by intolerance to the detriment of doctors and patients.

Every day, millions of Americans receive prescriptions for mental health concerns—anxiety, depression, panic, migraines, fatigue—often without a meaningful discussion of sleep, nutrition, stress physiology, or whether the body has the biological resources it needs to function optimally. More than half of American adults now take at least one prescription medication, and many take multiple medications daily, even as rates of mental illness, chronic disease, and metabolic dysfunction continue to rise.

We are intervening more than ever before, yet many people remain increasingly unwell.

What if the issue isn’t that symptoms are being ignored—but that the physiological foundations shaping those symptoms are rarely explained before treatment decisions are made?

This pattern appears repeatedly across different care settings. A postpartum woman struggling with anxiety and physical pain is offered medication without assessing whether pregnancy depleted nutrients critical for nervous system regulation and tissue repair. A woman with panic attacks and migraines tied to her cycle is prescribed pain and anti-anxiety medication without explanation of how hormonal shifts influence immune and neurological sensitivity. A patient with anxiety and infertility is offered ovulation-stimulating drugs without investigation into how stress physiology disrupted reproductive signaling in the first place.

In each case, symptoms are hastily addressed while the biological context driving them remains largely unexplored.

Why Physiology Gets Overlooked in Clinical Practice

This gap does not reflect a lack of scientific knowledge. Rather, it reflects how modern medical training and clinical systems are structured.

Nutrition, metabolism, and stress physiology are primarily taught through acute disease models, within isolated organ systems, and with an emphasis on diagnosis and pharmacologic correction rather than upstream depletion. Within this framework, clinicians are trained to recognize symptom patterns and intervene quickly—often under significant time and reimbursement constraints.

As a result, the complex interactions between metabolic health, hormones, immune signaling, and mental health symptoms are less likely to be thoroughly investigated or clearly communicated before treatment decisions are made. Patients are often offered solutions without being given the biological context needed to understand why those solutions were chosen—or what other contributors may be involved.

How Chiropractic Practice Revealed the Body–Mind Link

This systematic treatment gap became undeniable to me through my clinical practice as a chiropractor, where evaluating the nervous system is central to understanding pain, recovery, and regulation. Early in my training, a chiropractic mentor emphasized that many symptoms commonly treated as purely structural are often driven by underlying physiological or emotional strain.

In school, we were trained to recognize referral pain patterns and red flags indicating serious pathology—such as cancer, appendicitis, or gallbladder disease—and to use neurological findings to localize nerve root involvement or determine when imaging was warranted. What we were not taught was how common hormonal or metabolic imbalances could produce identifiable patterns of muscle weakness, altered recovery, or nervous system dysregulation.

Over time, it became clear in practice that no symptom exists in isolation. Structural, chemical, and emotional stressors continually interact, shaping how symptoms emerge and persist. In mental health, this often means that anxiety, low mood, and impaired stress tolerance reflect underlying biological strain rather than isolated psychological pathology—what I’ve come to recognize as the body-mind link.

Case Study: Postpartum Anxiety and Physiological Depletion

A postpartum mother presented several months after her second delivery with worsening anxiety, low mood, heightened sensitivity to noise, and difficulty sleeping. She described feeling emotionally unfamiliar to herself. Alongside these mental health symptoms, she also experienced persistent back pain and core instability that had not improved with standard strengthening protocols.

What had never been explained to her was how profoundly pregnancy and childbirth affect physiology. Pregnancy significantly increases demands for iron, B vitamins, magnesium, and zinc to support fetal development, placental growth, and expanded blood volume. Labor often involves meaningful blood loss, and postpartum sleep deprivation and breastfeeding further tax the nervous and hormonal systems.

Her labs reflected this cumulative strain: ferritin measured 18 ng/mL, vitamin B12 was borderline low, and magnesium status was suboptimal. Research has linked ferritin levels below 30 ng/mL with increased risk of anxiety, depression, impaired cognition, and reduced stress resilience—particularly in postpartum women.

Instead of this context, she had been offered pain medication for her back and an SSRI for her mood, along with reassurance that her experience was “normal postpartum.” While that statement was technically true, it lacked explanation. Normal does not mean inevitable, nor does it mean untreatable.

When her nutrient stores were replenished and her nervous system supported, her anxiety softened alongside improvements in physical recovery. The change was not psychological or physical alone—it was systemic.

Case Study: Anxiety, Infertility, and Stress Physiology

Another patient in her early 30s presented with persistent anxiety, insomnia, and difficulty conceiving. She had been diagnosed with “unexplained infertility” and told that ovulation-stimulating medication and oral progesterone were the next steps.

Her assessment revealed a consistent physiological pattern. Her luteal phase averaged eight days—shorter than the typical window needed to support implantation. B-vitamin markers were low-normal, fasting glucose fluctuated significantly throughout the day, and progesterone output was low during the luteal phase, when it would normally be expected to rise.

Chronic stress is known to suppress hypothalamic signaling involved in ovulation and progesterone production. These same stress patterns also heighten anxiety, impair sleep, and increase nervous system reactivity—yet this connection had never been explained to her.

Our treatment focus was on blood sugar regulation through nutrition and movement, nutrient repletion with a B-vitamin complex, hormone support using evidence-informed botanical and adaptogenic interventions, and nervous system regulation through chiropractic care. Her anxiety improved, ovulatory patterns normalized, and conception followed.

Case Study: Perimenopause, Panic attacks, and Immune Reactivity

A woman in her early 40s presented with severe migraines and panic attacks that predictably appeared in the days leading up to her period. Each month, she experienced heart palpitations, light sensitivity, and anxiety intense enough to disrupt work and sleep.

She had been told her labs were “normal,” and the primary options discussed were migraine medication and an anti-anxiety prescription—without explanation of why her symptoms followed such a clear hormonal pattern.

In her case, this hormonal vulnerability was compounded by a sustained state of chronic physiological stress that placed ongoing demand on her immune system. This was supported by her history of prolonged sleep disruption, high cognitive and emotional load, and a symptom pattern that closely tracked hormonal fluctuations—suggesting impaired stress resilience rather than an isolated acute trigger.

Estrogen and progesterone help regulate immune signaling, including how inflammatory responses are controlled. When these hormones decline in the luteal phase before menstruation, immune balance shifts, allowing inflammatory signaling to increase. That immune activation can then feed back into the nervous system, lowering the threshold for migraines, panic attacks, and sensory overwhelm. Her symptoms were not random—they were predictable physiological responses to layered stressors.

The Pattern Beneath the Stories

These cases reflect a broader pattern in mental health care: treatment decisions are often made without explaining the biological mechanisms contributing to emotional symptoms, and solutions are frequently focused on short-term symptom relief rather than addressing underlying drivers.

Blood sugar instability, nutrient depletion, sleep disruption, immune activation, inflammation, hormonal shifts, and stress physiology commonly go unmeasured or undiscussed—even though each meaningfully shapes mood, anxiety, focus, and emotional resilience. When these contributors are not explored, medication can feel like the most obvious option—not because it is inappropriate, but because alternative drivers were never discussed.

What Patients Can Ask to Have Evaluated

While no single test explains everything, certain evaluations can offer meaningful insight.

1. Nutrient Status

Several nutrients play direct roles in nervous system regulation, stress tolerance, and neurotransmitter function. Patients may consider asking about:

• Iron studies, especially ferritin (not just hemoglobin)

• Vitamin B12 and folate

• Magnesium (RBC magnesium can be more informative than serum)

• Vitamin D

• Zinc (when indicated by immune, digestive, or hormonal symptoms)

Low or borderline levels in these markers have been associated in research with anxiety, depression, cognitive fatigue, and postpartum mood symptoms.

2. Blood Sugar Regulation

Blood sugar instability is a common and underrecognized driver of anxiety, panic symptoms, irritability, and fatigue. Helpful markers may include:

• Fasting glucose

• Fasting insulin

• Hemoglobin A1c

When blood sugar fluctuates, stress hormones rise, increasing nervous system reactivity and emotional instability.

3. Hormonal Patterns

Hormones strongly influence emotional regulation and nervous system sensitivity. Depending on symptoms and life stage, evaluation may include:

• Progesterone and estrogen patterns, particularly in the luteal phase or during perimenopause

• Thyroid markers (TSH, free T3, free T4, and antibodies when indicated)

• Cortisol rhythm, ideally assessed across the day rather than with a single blood draw

Even subtle hormonal shifts—within “normal” lab ranges—can meaningfully affect mood, sleep, and stress resilience. Estrogen and progesterone regulate key neurotransmitter systems involved in emotional regulation, including serotonin and GABA. Research shows that fluctuations in these hormones across the menstrual cycle and perimenopause are linked to changes in anxiety, mood stability, sleep quality, and stress sensitivity—even when hormone levels fall within standard reference ranges. This helps explain why people may experience significant emotional symptoms despite being told their labs are “normal.”

When Medication May Be Appropriate

Medication can play an important role in mental health care, particularly in acute or destabilizing situations—such as severe panic, major depression with suicidal ideation, psychosis, or anxiety that significantly impairs daily functioning. In these cases, pharmacologic support may be necessary to stabilize symptoms and ensure safety.

Medication may also be appropriate when the foundational contributors that have been discussed within this article have been explored, yet symptoms remain inadequately controlled. For some individuals, neurochemical support may be an essential layer of care.

At the center of this discussion is informed decision-making. Patients deserve a clear understanding of what medication is intended to address, what it may not resolve, and what other biological factors could be influencing their symptoms. That context allows treatment decisions to be collaborative rather than reactive.

When care includes explanation—not just intervention—symptoms are less likely to be experienced as personal failures and more likely to be understood as meaningful signals. That understanding often changes not only how people feel, but how they engage in their own healing.

Coming Next In This Series:

In Part II, we’ll examine how these patterns often occur within adolescence, a period of rapid brain, metabolic, and hormonal development. We’ll explore how SSRIs and hormonal contraceptives are frequently prescribed to teens navigating normal developmental changes—often without thorough evaluation of nutrient status, sleep quality, blood sugar regulation, or overall metabolic health. We’ll also consider how altering neurotransmitter and hormone signaling during these critical windows may have downstream effects on mental, metabolic, and reproductive health later in life.

Share

To learn more about this subject, join FAIR and Dr. Kendra Kautz next week:

Register

We welcome you to share your thoughts on this piece in the comments below. Click here to view our comment section moderation policy. 

The opinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of Fair For All or its employees.

In keeping with our mission to promote a common culture of fairness, understanding, and humanity, we are committed to including a diverse range of voices and to encouraging compassionate, good-faith discourse.

We are actively seeking other perspectives on this topic and others. If you’d like to join the conversation, please send drafts to submissions@fairforall.org.

On January 18, 2026, protesters disrupted a church service to demand “justice” for Renee Good and an end to immigration enforcement, violating a social norm that most people still regard as basic. Scenes like this have become less unusual in recent years. As protests against ICE continue, sometimes escalating in troubling ways, I find myself, along with many others, caught in an uncomfortable position. I agree that ICE has overreached, violated long-standing norms, and in some cases may even have crossed legal boundaries. And yet, despite sharing many of the protesters’ substantive concerns, I often find myself unable to support the way those concerns are being expressed.

This feeling isn’t new. I’ve experienced it with left-wing protest movements since at least 2020. There is something about them that feels misguided and unserious, even when the cause itself is serious. I notice it in my own reaction: a sense of discomfort when I see peaceful anti-ICE demonstrations, raised fists, and familiar slogans, even though I broadly agree with their message. At the same time, that same reaction doesn’t surface when I think about the events of January 6, 2021, which struck me as tragic and dangerous rather than performative. Nor did I feel it watching the Hong Kong protests of 2019—a movement that still fills me with admiration for the protesters’ courage and sadness over their defeat. Why does one form of protest inspire respect, while another—closer to home—elicits unease? Is this simply bias, or something more structural?

I think it is more than bias, and that understanding the difference matters. If we want to draw attention to injustice, and to real risks of authoritarian drift in the United States, we need protest movements that persuade rather than alienate.

By “left-wing” protest movements here, I mean familiar examples: anti-ICE demonstrations, Black Lives Matter protests and the unrest associated with them, and recent anti-Israel protests. What unites many of these movements is not their goals, but the way those goals are pursued. Too often, moral seriousness is replaced by moral performance. Emotional expression, symbolic disruption, and a sense of assumed righteousness are elevated over discipline, proportionality, and concrete, achievable change.

Many protesters clearly see themselves as heirs to the civil rights movement. But the comparison often falters. When we look back at Birmingham in the 1960s, we see protesters who faced violence and humiliation with restraint and dignity, exposing injustice without reveling in it. Today’s protests frequently project a tone of sarcasm, contempt, and theatrical outrage. Rather than appealing to the conscience of broader society, they often signal belonging to an in-group that already agrees.

There is also a difference in risk that matters. The protesters in Hong Kong faced a genuine authoritarian state, one willing to permanently destroy their futures. In contrast, American protesters—while sometimes unfairly arrested or mistreated, which should never be minimized—generally operate in a system where most will return home safely at the end of the day. Scale matters. Recognizing this does not diminish legitimate grievances; it grounds them in reality. When demands are framed in sweeping, absolute terms—“Abolish ICE,” for example—without clear legal pathways or specific reforms, the movement can appear less focused on solutions than on the act of protest itself. The result is a cycle where symbolic expression becomes the goal, and concrete outcomes remain secondary.

This tendency is reinforced by the use of extreme language. Allegations that ICE has violated due process rights are serious and alarming on their own. They do not need amplification through comparisons to the Holocaust or other historical atrocities. Hyperbole weakens credibility and signals that the primary purpose of the protest may be emotional release rather than persuasion or reform.

So where does that leave us, when political expression so often becomes a contest of outrage rather than a search for solutions? This problem is not unique to the left, but it is particularly visible there right now. A first step may be to disengage from social media environments that reward emotional escalation and flatten complex moral issues into slogans. We should also reaffirm basic civic norms. Sacred spaces exist, and they deserve respect. If the concern is government overreach, that concern should be expressed in ways that uphold, rather than corrode, shared public life.

Societies weaken when protest becomes primarily an outlet for rage, and when spectacle replaces persuasion. Protest is most powerful when it appeals to our shared humanity—when it treats even opponents as people capable of being convinced, rather than obstacles to be shamed.

If we can return to forms of protest that are disciplined, humane, and oriented toward real change, then exercising the right to dissent might once again feel like a serious moral act rather than an empty performance.

Share

We welcome you to share your thoughts on this piece in the comments below. Click here to view our comment section moderation policy. 

The opinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the Fair For All or its employees.

In keeping with our mission to promote a common culture of fairness, understanding, and humanity, we are committed to including a diversity of voices and encouraging compassionate and good-faith discourse.

We are actively seeking other perspectives on this topic and others. If you’d like to join the conversation, please send drafts to submissions@fairforall.org.

Editors Note: Below you will find a long-form essay by Mary McDonald-Lewis. We generally don’t publish long-form content on our Substack, but Mary’s voice and experience are so timely and important that we feel compelled to share this in its original form.

On December 18th at 7pm EST, Mary and Monica Harris will explore the human cost of cancellation, the spiritual and emotional dimensions that often go unseen, and the importance of building a culture where disagreement does not mean disposability. Mary will share her story, her losses, her resilience, and her hope for a better future. If Mary’s story moves you, please consider joining us.

It was a brisk September San Francisco morning, and the brunch joint was jumping. The moment had come. She had to know, in case what I feared was going to come to fruition. I pushed aside my maitake soft scramble, took a deep breath, and told my lovely daughter, as carefully as I could, that I had lost “purpose” in my life.

But what I meant was, I had lost the will to live. What I meant was, I was considering suicide.

How did I get here?

This is the third of three essays for FAIR, the first two of which track my initial cancellation in theater, and my subsequent cancellation and continued hounding. This one tells the story of my escape across the country... and my last cancellation. In the first, I ended up hoping to return to my art. The second concluded with the suspicion that my torment would continue, should I try to make art again.

It did. And it got me canceled for that third and final time.

So here is the only story I am permitted to tell now: my life sentence as an exiled artist, how it led to thoughts of suicide over eggs and cappuccino, and what happened after that brunch.

A little back story. After a dozen years as their resident dialect coach, in 2019 I was fired from both of Portland Oregon’s largest Equity theater companies for refusing to use demanded pronouns. Following this, from Oregon’s most popular coach I became the most reviled: dropped from every other theater in the state, stage work dried up entirely. But I was busy with film/television jobs and voice-over gigs, my union pensions and Social Security had kicked in, and theater never paid much anyway. Still, it was my local community, and most in it had begun to abandon their friendship with me, too. Cancellation #1.

About four years later, in 2023, I pitched a longtime friend and colleague on adapting Shakespeare’s Macbeth to a shorter, lens-down version—The Macbeths—which focused on the relationship between Mackers and Lady M. Other than the loss of work and friendships, it had been fairly quiet, especially with COVID-19 carving a firebreak through the, well, firestorms of the woke Portland theater community.

But as soon as the leftists discovered I was working on a new project, they attacked it by promoting me as a transphobe, racist, Zionist, and so on all over social media; by pushing my partner and the director to abandon me; by promising to destroy the reputations of anyone associated with the show; and by threatening pickets at the theater on opening night.

It worked.

My show was boycotted, I was betrayed by my partner and the director, kicked out of the theater space, damned in Willamette Week, Portland’s local left-wing rag, and attacked and threatened by the community.

The show shut down two weeks from opening, and I immediately made plans to move. Cancellation #2.

(Nota bene: See the end of the essay for more on The Macbeths.)

After 32 years in Portland, 70 days later I pulled up to my new home, 3,000 miles away in the Mid-Atlantic South. Once I was tucked into my cozy new neighborhood, an old writing partner living nearby reached out and proposed we start a readers theater company—that’s a staged reading operation where actors perform with script in hand, often simply at music stands. I’d had my own staged reading company for 20 seasons in Portland, and thought that was a splendid idea. So just as with The Macbeths, I got busy. I designed the logo, prepared the marketing, publicized auditions, met with the actors, began to solidify the cast, located a performance space... but when I let an interested actor know I only used standard pronouns on my stage, it happened all over again.

The actor leapt to various local theater pages on Facebook, declaring me a TERF (and a racist, for some reason), demanding the company be killed, and encouraging others to pile on—which they did by the dozens on those social media sites. They found the Willamette Week article about The Macbeths and published it widely on Facebook. They connected with the leftist actors in the Pacific Northwest and followed their playbook to the letter. Though inaccurate and hyperbolic in the extreme, Dustin K. Britt posted on several pages:

“Mary McDonald-Lewis has come to (my location). A known racist and TERF, she’s crisscrossing the country trying to get awful plays produced. She’s raised enough money to try and get readings here. It’s important that (the staged reading company) never become an entity in this community or any other.”

A typical reply was:

“It’s wild that she thought she could come to the Triangle and be successful with her disgusting views.”

This inspired Beau Clark’s suggestions:

“Everyone should post on all your own local pages tagging both (the company) and (the theater space). Let them see (this is from) the vast majority of the triangle theater community. Flood both of the ‘mentions’ sections with indicators that by aligning with Mary Mac, any patronage will equal being complicit in transphobia. Also, they have a staged reading on Oct 16th. Ready up some signs and flood the sidewalk outside.”

Britt and the mob went on to both condemn and pressure my partner to bail, and to threaten the theater space with boycott. Within days, I was blocked from all area theater social media pages, we lost the performing venue, the company folded, and the project was dead. It was chapter and verse the exact same cancellation plan as that which killed The Macbeths. Cancellation #3.

This was underscored soon after by an old-school, late-night obscene phone call wishing me all kinds of nasty harm, hoping, oddly, that both the president and I would die of “blood clots,” and by an encounter I had in a local dog park, where a man offered to introduce me to the storytelling community. I was thrilled and eagerly provided him my name and contact information. Within an hour he texted me: “Mary, I’ve done a bit of looking at social media and reading article published in Oregon. I’m sorry to say I don’t think you would care much for many of my views,” and he wished me luck. A dog park cancellation for dessert!

The bright spot was, my former partner remains my steadfast friend, though we are no longer producing together.

The dark spot was, I had finally learned the truth: after three vicious cancellations, it was clear that I was exiled forever from making art. And that’s what made me feel like there was no point in living any longer.

And there are very real reasons for this feeling.

We are born confused, with not much to go on other than cling to your mother and mimic everything you see (for better or for worse). We are also born with a need to tidy up that confusion, to recognize patterns and strive for harmony—that is, to somehow rhythm and rhyme the chaos outside, and inside, us. So we set out to organize our world in deeply personal ways. Grappling with the immensity of infinity, Swiss mathematician Jacob Bernoulli expressed one facet of his organizing framework in Ars Conjectandi, written in the late 1600s, this way:

Even as the finite encloses an infinite series.
And in the unlimited limits appear,
So the soul of immensity dwells in minutia.
And in the narrowest limits no limit in here.
What joy to discern the minute in infinity!
The vast to perceive in the small, what divinity!

Rather than look outward, Benoît Mandelbrot’s search for harmony took him inward, to discover what became known as the Mandelbrot set, a system described by Quanta magazine’s math editor Jordana Cepelwicz in The Quest to Decode the Mandelbrot Set, Math’s Famed Fractal as “more than a fractal, and not just in a metaphorical sense. It serves as a sort of master catalog of dynamical systems—of all the different ways a point might move through space according to a simple rule.”

Like Vespucci at the edge of the Amazon, Mandelbrot sought to discover the mouth of the river, the font—something, anything—that organized the way a point—us—might move through space, hopefully according to a simple rule. From Pythagoras of Samos to Jackson Pollock of Cody, we are all searching for a Theory of Everything, and we describe it in the way our mind dictates, often through art. We struggle to compose the music of the spheres, we wrestle with words to write about the mystery and with numbers to decode it, and with molten metal to form our Thinker. Ecce homo. As the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling soars nearly 70 feet above us, Michelangelo’s God reaches to Adam, his hand outstretched, and Man is touched, created, born. Millions have sighed at its beauty, but below the immediate appreciation is the relief at the artist’s explanation: here we are, moving through space, accompanied.

Now take away Bernoulli’s pen, Mandelbrot’s microscope, Vespucci’s sails, Pythagoras’ voice, Pollock’s paintbrush, Rodin’s bronze, Michelangelo’s lapis lazuli. Banish them from their art. Two things have been accomplished: you have driven these men to madness, and you have deprived us of all that they gave us, and everything that came after it.

It is a nearly perfect crime, for two reasons. First, because the hand of the assassin is not seen—the figurative or actual death accomplished through the denial of essential personhood. Profound depression follows, and in the end, the artist conspires with their tormentors and does the silencing themselves. Second, because every time one artist is censored, canceled, fired, deplatformed, doxed, swatted, threatened with rape or murder, or actually harmed, most of the rest of the arts community either joins in the mob or doubles down on their silence. No perpetrator, no witnesses, no outrage, no justice. Simply the little loss of one artist, and the monumental loss of that artist’s voice.

Given that our articulated purpose, married, if we are lucky, to an abiding way of expressing it, approaches the sacred, then rendering it mute rises to that measure as well. It is a theft that is close to stealing the soul. But the canceled artist loses even more. After his work is taken from him, he loses his tribe: family, friends, colleagues turn their backs on him, and he is both silenced and utterly alone.

Shunning is a practice used in some churches and all cults, and cancellation is its modern sinister application. A recent Psychology Today article, How Religious Shunning Ruins Lives, details the damage: “Research has shown that shunned individuals often experience feelings of depression, helplessness, hopelessness, low self-esteem, suicidal ideation, and self-harming behaviors.”

Shunning—cancellation—according to Dr. Kipling D. Williams, professor of psychological sciences at Purdue University, “is like a social death penalty—and studies prove this point. Exclusion has been found to cause pain that cuts deeper and lasts longer than a physical injury.” The brain registers the rejection as a physical wound, with the distinct disadvantage that while bodily harm heals, brain harm is far more difficult to resolve. This is particularly true as shunning attacks four basic human needs: belonging, self-esteem, control, and meaningful existence. What follows is hopelessness, loss of health, home, and possibly life. Shunning is malevolent violence of the cruel and unusual kind.

Williams, author of Ostracism: The Power of Silence, expands on the research on this podcast.

The artist who has their organizing principle taken from them no longer has a means of creating and maintaining harmony. They face nothing but chaos, and they are shunned, left alone in this state. Is it any wonder that abandonment in this dark and howling landscape can lead to thoughts of self-destruction? From the same article: “Humans have a primal need for social support. Without a sense of belonging—a feeling of emotional safety and context—people come to fear that their very lives are at risk. They lose the ability to trust and connect with others, instead becoming consumed by the task of surviving alone.”

Once banished, the artist begins to manifest the trauma. Having lost both their coping mechanism and their community, they can feel isolated, lonely, and paranoid. For me, in Portland before I fled, those rare times I went to the theater I was nervous, awkward, not knowing who my friends or (as far as they were concerned) enemies were. It becomes hard to be one’s self, as we second-guess all interactions. The unreturned phone calls, texts, emails seem proof of yet another abandonment, whether true or not. And new friends feel impossible to make. Remember, Maslow places “love and belonging” in third place in his hierarchy of needs—between survival and safety, below, and esteem and self-actualization, above. This makes sense to me: connection is a kind of fulcrum, a psychological/emotional on-off switch which informs the other four.

And this brings me back to that table in the noisy bistro, considering suicide.

I was carved out by my final cancellation. Defeated. I used to say my motto was “Tell a story, save the world,” and now I was never going to tell a story again. I was this close to giving up. I confessed to my daughter, in so many words, that I didn’t want to live; I made my way back across the country, went inside, and closed the door.

But then I recalled the voice that spoke to me during my second cancellation, and which ended my second essay for FAIR. “I didn’t come here to have an easy time,” it told me. So, fending off the demon thoughts persecuting me, I did something I don’t usually do: I asked for help. I reached out to FAIR again, to write this essay to all of you. And from my conversation with Brent Morden, Director, FAIR in the Arts, came my salvation.

I told Brent I was lost—adrift in purpose, awash in hopelessness. I had no compass for a path forward, and my scripts, both figurative and literal, had been torn to pieces. “Time to improvise,” Brent said. “Have you ever read Albert Murray? He says improvisation is the hero’s journey.” I was instantly interested. Phone cradled to my ear, I hopped online and ordered his collected essays and memoirs immediately.

Murray (1916–2013) was a novelist, essayist, biographer, literary and music critic, and teacher. His passions were the blues, jazz, and literature, with a special love for Duke Ellington and his friend Ralph Ellison, and for Hemingway and Thomas Mann. He was also a thinker of colossal and prodigious status. The Hero and the Blues is his long essay on the subject Brent brought up.

Consider the jazz break, Murray says, as the moment the hero is called to improvise. Every other musician on that stage is silent, and it’s up to the sax player to make his case. He moves into the void, calling on everything inside him: the sweet and the sour, the lost and the found, the grief and the grace to make something new. Brand new, and brave, and healing, and an aid to everyone who hears it.

God touches Adam’s hand, and with an infant’s gasp, he comes to life. Improvising.

And it’s needed. Moving from the jazz man to the scribe, “It is the writer, as artist, not the social or political engineer, or even the philosopher, who first comes to realize when the time is out of joint. It is he who determines the extent and gravity of the current human predicament, who, in fact, discovers and describes the hidden elements of destruction, sounds the alarm, and even… designate the targets.”

There’s plenty in the way of this artistic improv, maybe more than ever before. But (agreeing with Aurelius here) Murray tells us the obstacle is the way. He calls it “antagonistic cooperation, a concept which is indispensable to any fundamental definition of heroic action, fiction or otherwise. The fire in the forging process, like the dragon which the hero must always encounter, is of its very nature antagonistic, but it is also cooperative at the same time. For all its violence, it does not destroy the metal which becomes the sword. It functions precisely to strengthen and prepare it to hold its battle edge, even as the all but withering firedrake prepares the questing hero for subsequent trials and adventures.”

To engage in the artist’s quest is Quixotic, to say the least, especially today. The leftist theater community on both coasts of this country stole my storytelling and imperiled my life. But since every day, as Murray told one interviewer, “is like either … cut your throat or be down at the Savoy [Ballroom] by 9:30,” I’m going to pick up my sword, thank God for antagonistic cooperation, and tell this story: What this movement does is immoral and base, a cowardly, carnivorous thing. Many thousands of artists are suffering because of it. It has malignant intentions for our country, and will rot the heart of us to achieve them. But if we are brave. If we refuse to be silenced. If we recruit more and more artists to this cause, we will endure this darkness, we will emerge from it, and we will triumph in the light. “Indeed,” says Murray, “...in the final analysis the greatness of the hero can be measured only in scale with the mischief, malaise, or menace he can dispatch.”

So in my own small way, I’m going to try and be great. I’m going to do that, instead of filling my daughter with dread over a nice meal on a bright San Francisco day. I will not die because of everything they have done to me, my dear and beautiful child. I will live for the very same reason.

I closed my last essay with a poem. I’ll close this one with a song I chart my course by.

Unsinkable, by Sail North

Unsinkable

Aim high, swing hard, leave it out there, no regrets
My blood is in the water and the sharks are taking bets
They circle are waiting for my final breath
But they won’t see me drown
I hoist my sails for the treasure in the sea
The winds that blow behind me take me where I’m supposed to be
I’m raising hell for the ones who don’t believe
Their words can’t drag me down

When the wind rips the tide
I will sail
Reach the other side
Let the storm roll on wild
I was born for this
I’m unsinkable.

Nota bene 1: My fundraiser, Speak up for a Silenced Artist, has raised money for a staging of my play, The Macbeths. Because of the cancellations and to prevent further harassment, I cannot share specifics, but these donations will be put to use in the designated way.

Nota bene 2: Alluded to here is the concept of “soul murder,” which was “first used in the legal code of Saxony in the early 19th century and later by playwrights Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg to describe the destruction of a person’s vitality or love of life.” The term became more commonly known through the work of psychoanalyst Leonard Shengold in his 1989 book, Soul Murder: The Effects of Childhood Abuse and Deprivation.

The Toll of Cancellation on the Human Spirit

On December 18th at 7pm EST, we will explore the human cost of cancellation, the spiritual and emotional dimensions that often go unseen, and the importance of building a culture where disagreement does not mean disposability. Our guest Mary McDonald-Lewis will share her story, her losses, her resilience, and her hope for a better future—one marked not by fear, but by exchange, openness, and shared humanity.

Register

We welcome you to share your thoughts on this piece in the comments below. Click here to view our comment section moderation policy. 

The opinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the Fair For All or its employees.

In keeping with our mission to promote a common culture of fairness, understanding, and humanity, we are committed to including a diversity of voices and encouraging compassionate and good-faith discourse.

We are actively seeking other perspectives on this topic and others. If you’d like to join the conversation, please send drafts to submissions@fairforall.org.

K–12 education in the United States has undergone an unprecedented degree of politicization. Educators’ personal opinions and political advocacy have increasingly become focal points in the classroom. Instead of emphasizing academic rigor, critical thinking, and preparation for college or vocational paths, some districts now issue formal political statements, promote one-sided narratives, and overlook laws that prohibit using classrooms for personal advocacy.

This politicization spans multiple subject areas. In math, some districts have replaced traditional curricula with “equitable math,” eliminating honors classes and teaching that mathematics has been “used to disenfranchise people and communities of color.” (Seattle Math Framework, 2019) Under the banner of “equity,” many districts have removed advanced courses altogether.

History curricula have also shifted. Traditional objectives such as “Understand the founding ideals of American democracy” have been replaced with directives to “challenge outdated dominant narratives that reinforce hegemony in modern American history.” (San Mateo, 2024)

Ethnic Studies—especially in California—has become a national case study in how activist educators can reshape how students learn about identity, history, and civic engagement. Instead of maintaining the classroom as an academic environment, the course, in its “Liberated” form, is often used to advance educators’ personal political beliefs and biases. Where states require Ethnic Studies, the class typically replaces a semester of World History or U.S. History.

To the general public, Ethnic Studies is understood as an opportunity for students to learn about diverse communities, their histories, and their contributions to American society. In practice, however, many districts have adopted radicalized curricula focused almost entirely on power structures while promoting a narrow ideological framework without critical analysis. In San Francisco Unified, students are taught “essential” Ethnic Studies vocabulary such as “indoctrinate,” “oppress,” “marginalized,” “system,” and “privilege.” They are then instructed to categorize their own immutable characteristics—race, ethnicity, body size, sexuality, and economic status—and identify themselves as either “powerful” or “marginalized,” with no alternative categories. (SFUSD, 2024) This approach is often referred to as “Liberated Ethnic Studies.”

By contrast, Constructive Ethnic Studies centers on the contributions of ethnic minorities to the development of the United States. This approach encourages student inquiry, presents multiple viewpoints, and includes analysis of race and racism—historically and in the modern era—without reducing students to predetermined roles. It helps students see themselves in the curriculum while fostering understanding of their peers without stereotyping or assigning blame.

Politicized Ethnic Studies models, on the other hand, encourage students to adopt specific ideological positions, engage in radical activism, and view themselves and others through a victim–oppressor framework. In some districts, students are asked to identify “oppressors” in their own lives—including their school, parents, or religion. (Mountain View, 2023)

The Alliance for Constructive Ethnic Studies (ACES) was formed to help parents, educators, and communities navigate the rapid expansion of politicized Ethnic Studies programs. Most public schools in California have adopted some form of Ethnic Studies instruction, and a growing number of states are implementing their own guidelines or requirements. As a result, districts nationwide are overhauling history and social science curricula—often with limited transparency and minimal parent involvement.

ACES supports parents and collaborates with school districts to ensure that curricula remain academically rigorous, legally compliant, and free from political indoctrination.Recognizing this urgent need for balanced alternatives, FAIR has developed The American Experience curriculum—a comprehensive high school course that meets California Ethnic Studies standards while exploring diverse American experiences through constitutional frameworks rather than divisive power structures. FAIR’s curriculum uses primary sources and civil discourse techniques to help students understand what it means to be American in a pluralistic society. During our upcoming webinar, we’ll explore how this constructive approach provides the academically rigorous, legally compliant instruction that communities are demanding.

Please join us to learn how ACES and FAIR are working to protect students, promote constructive and high-quality education, and support communities seeking depoliticized, balanced instruction.

The Alliance for Constructive Ethnic Studies is a diverse, nonpartisan coalition working to remove narrow ideological agendas from curricula and foster K–12 Ethnic Studies that inspire mutual respect, counter racism, and celebrate the accomplishments of all ethnic groups.

Depoliticizing K-12 Education: What to Know, What to Do

K-12 schools nationwide are increasingly becoming infused with political agendas. Learn what politicization looks like throughout curricula, including in subjects such as Ethnic Studies. On December 16th at 8:30pm EST, join us to find out how ACES and FAIR are working to protect students and promote constructive, quality education, and what YOU can do in your own communities.

Register

We welcome you to share your thoughts on this piece in the comments below. Click here to view our comment section moderation policy. 

The opinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the Fair For All or its employees.

In keeping with our mission to promote a common culture of fairness, understanding, and humanity, we are committed to including a diversity of voices and encouraging compassionate and good-faith discourse.

We are actively seeking other perspectives on this topic and others. If you’d like to join the conversation, please send drafts to submissions@fairforall.org.

A Politico report recently revealed how Americans see our country and the American dream, and the results are bleak. A plurality of respondents believe that our nation’s best times are behind us. Forty-six percent of respondents agree that “The American dream no longer exists,” and those numbers are even higher for younger generations. Fifty-two percent are so dispirited by the state of our country that they say that “we need radical change” in order to “make life better in America.” Again, those numbers are higher for younger generations.

What’s going on? Why are so many of us, especially my generation and younger (I’m 34), in despair about the state of our nation—and, by extension, the state of our own lives? The report posits several explanations, from a struggling economy to a dearth of meaning in our lives to toxic polarization.

I think there’s truth to many of these explanations, but one key piece of the puzzle isn’t being discussed: fewer and fewer of us feel seen.

Feeling seen and acknowledged is a foundational human need, up there with food and water and shelter. In 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Steven Covey argues that the need to feel seen and listened to on a deep level is so acute that he equates the feeling of being listened to with breathing in “psychological air.” As a quote widely attributed to Covey goes, “The deepest desire of the human spirit is to be acknowledged.”

In Anatomy of the Soul, psychiatrist Curt Thompson says that the experience of being deeply seen is an essential aspect of the good life. He writes:

“The process of being known is the vessel in which our lives are kneaded and molded, lanced and sutured, confronted and comforted…[i]t is the communal container in which the information about the mind and relationships that we will explore in this book takes its shape and gives birth to the graces of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.”

But our modern society gives us fewer and fewer opportunities to be deeply known.

For one thing: as more and more of our entertainment and our lives becomes mediated through screens, we’ve started to lose the types of deep relationships that our ancestors took for granted. Writing in 1999, Robert Putnam documented how the rise of television had contributed to a society that bowled alone, because more and more of us were spending our evenings in front of the television set rather than going out and interacting with our neighbors. Since then the problem has gotten exponentially worse.

In Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation, then-Surgeon General Dr. Vivek H. Murthy wrote that, “People began to tell me they felt isolated, invisible, and insignificant.” He recounts Americans across economic and racial divides telling him that they felt like, “if I disappear tomorrow, no one will even notice.”

To put numbers to this disturbing phenomenon, Murphy reports that: “In recent years, about one-in-two adults in America reported experiencing loneliness. And that was before the COVID-19 pandemic cut off so many of us from friends, loved ones, and support systems, exacerbating loneliness and isolation.”

Americans today—especially young people—might have more casual friendships, especially because social media puts us in touch with hundreds of people every day. But those casual relationships don’t provide the “psychological air” that Covey describes. They don’t offer us the opportunity to be deeply seen, in all of our complexity and messiness, by another human being. Only close friendships do that, and close friendships are on the decline. A report by the Survey Center On American Life found that 12 percent of Americans reported having no close friends in 2021, up from 3 percent in 1990. An astounding 49 percent report having three or fewer close friends in 2021, up from 27 percent in 1990. Some of that increase is due to the pandemic, but some is also caused by societal shifts towards atomistic lives.

If the problem is that fewer and fewer of us feel seen, we might think that what I call “vulnerability culture” would provide an antidote. “Vulnerability culture” is the new trend of opening up, often on social media, about our worst mental or physical problems. Younger Americans especially are participating in “vulnerability culture” in ways that one would think would lead to us feeling seen. So why doesn’t it work?

For one thing, a lot of this “vulnerability culture” is mediated online. When Simone Biles dropped out of the 2020 Olympics in order to prioritize her mental health, she became the subject of glowing news articles and social media adoration. But most of this attention came online, from strangers. It came from people who only saw a tiny slice of Biles’ life, and whose lives in turn she saw only a tiny fraction of. This kind of adoration may sound like it should make us feel seen, but it rarely does because it’s so shallow.

This has been my own experience. For decades I struggled with intense depression and with the grueling after-effects of being abused as a child. When I opened up about my struggles, I got lots of validation and attention on social media. But none of it made any real difference, because it was from strangers.

Thompson talks about the importance of seeing someone seeing you. For example, a child with her loving mother: the mother sees the child, and the child is deeply and intimately aware of her mother seeing her. That kind of seeing can make a real difference to peoples’ mental health. It’s not the kind of thing that can be replicated via online attention and social media. Quantity cannot make up for quality.

There’s also a more pernicious aspect to “vulnerability culture.” Sometimes the focus is not only on seeing peoples’ despair; sometimes the focus is on keeping people in that state of despair. Misery loves company, after all. In 2022 Suzy Weiss reported on the phenomenon of “spoonie” culture, a frequently toxic subculture for young women who are sick. This subculture can help people with brutal diagnoses to feel seen and validated in their pain. But, as Weiss reports, there’s a dark side: the community seems set up to keep people sick. She quotes psychiatrist Mark Sullivan, who worries that the Internet has created “communities of grievance” in which patients can adopt “victim mentalities” for attention and validation.

Spoonie culture struggles to help people who are suffering to feel seen, because it can only see part of them. It can see their illness and their pain. But it has a harder time seeing their fortitude, their drive to get better, or even their humanity outside of their sickness. As Sophie Jacobson, who was active in the spoonie community at the time, told Weiss, ““Someone asked me recently, ‘Who are you outside of being sick?’ and my jaw dropped. I had absolutely no idea how to answer that question.” Such communities struggle to offer their members the “psychological air” that Covey says that we all need.

If spoonie culture obsesses over our sickness, then the polar opposite would be the well-meaning (and generally older) people who deride the problems that young Americans face as simply stemming from entitlement and privilege; i.e. as being “first world problems.” To be clear, this mindset does come with some benefits. After I spent a year in Kenya seeing abject poverty up close, I decided that I was never going to complain about money again, even through the financial vagaries of being a freelance author. I’ve mostly kept to that decision, and it’s been good for me. Sometimes, when we get upset that our Netflix shorted out or that we don’t have money for a brand new phone, reminding ourselves that we’re suffering from first world problems can give us some perspective.

But as philosopher Alan Noble points out in You Are Not Your Own, the modern world comes with its own enormous challenges. We face obstacles that our ancestors didn’t. We might not deal with a high infant mortality rate or with wondering where our next meal is coming from, but we face existential problems of our own: a dearth of meaning, a lack of feeling of belonging, a culture that conflates our financial success with our worth as a human being. As Noble argues, these problems can cause profound pain: he suggests that they’re behind a huge part of the spike in mental illness among young people, as well as a driver of deaths of despair. If our goal is to be seen, then sweeping these problems under the rug or dismissing the angst that comes from them as stemming from privilege and entitlement is profoundly counterproductive.

So if much of our societal despair is caused by not feeling seen, what can we do about the problem?

The good news is that we don’t have to wait for our broken society to fix itself. Each of us, in our own lives, can take two powerful steps to be seen more fully and to experience the mental health benefits thereof.

First, we can consciously invest in deep offline relationships. We can log off of social media and rekindle old friendships. We can make the small sacrifices to invest in and grow relationships—missing an hour of sleep in order to listen to a family member who’s going through a hard time, making the courageous decision to open up to a casual friend about something deeper in our own lives.

These relationships cannot be built quickly, because intimacy takes time to cultivate. It requires a hundred small decisions, a thousand small investments. But these investments are worth the cost. As Thompson notes, being fully seen by another human being is essential to integrating our prefrontal cortex. Integrating our prefrontal cortex leads to a slew of benefits, including “Emotional balance,” “response flexibility” (essentially, the ability to respond calmly to a situation rather than react), a reduction in fear, and “living with a sense of vitality, expectation, and hope.”

The second step that we can take, if we are so inclined, is to cultivate a relationship with the divine.

This is not a popular recommendation in certain circles, but I think it’s one that deserves our serious consideration. If God does exist, then He is the one being in the entire universe who would know us with perfect clarity. He would know every hair on our heads, every thought that’s ever passed through our hearts—because He created us. And, He would love us infinitely (1 John 4:8). If part of our societal malaise is not being seen and known, what could be more healing than to be seen and known perfectly by God?

Indeed, Thompson says that helping his patients to feel known and loved by God has been essential to their healing. He tells the story of “Laura,” a composite of many patients he has seen over the years who struggle with intense depression. Part of how Thompson helped Laura was traditional psychotherapy, together with helping her to see and feel seen by other human beings. But Thompson stresses that a key part was reshaping her relationship with the divine: helping her to listen to and believe God’s “voice” when it told her: “’You are my daughter—one I love. I am so very pleased you are on the earth.’” Thompson says that this combination helped Laura to get to a place where her depression “no longer plagued her to any degree of serious consequence.”

Perhaps this combination of feeling deeply seen by other humans and also deeply seen by God can combat our societal malaise in the same way that it combatted Laura’s depression.

Subscribe now

We welcome you to share your thoughts on this piece in the comments below. Click here to view our comment section moderation policy. 

The opinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the Fair For All or its employees.

In keeping with our mission to promote a common culture of fairness, understanding, and humanity, we are committed to including a diversity of voices and encouraging compassionate and good-faith discourse.

We are actively seeking other perspectives on this topic and others. If you’d like to join the conversation, please send drafts to submissions@fairforall.org.