Brazil in Crisis / India’s Girl Problem
27.05.2016
COLOR BIND TEENS AND RACE IN AMERICA
Subscribe Now 12 issues for £12
Connect with the world’s most entertaining writers and critics.
Subscribe today and you will receive: • The London Review of Books magazine delivered direct to your door • FREE unfettered access to the searchable online digital archive • The latest issues FREE on your iPad, iPhone or Android device through the LRB app, so you can take the LRB everywhere you go
Subscribe now to become part of the conversation.
www.mylrb.co.uk/nsoffer
MAY 27, 2016
VOL.166
NO.20
+ EARLY DISMISSAL:
Girls read at a primary school in Uttar Pradesh, India. According to UNICEF, 94 percent of girls enroll in school at the primary level, but many leave due to poverty or to be married off.
19 Pests
Father Knows Pest
20 Iran
The Great Nuclear Deal Meltdown
FEATURES
DEPARTMENTS
T E E N S TO DAY 54 Diversity
22
The End of Karma
B I G S H OTS
In the north Indian city of Gurgaon, a young woman hopes education will be her exit ticket from a life of service. by Somini Sengupta 32
4 Maaret al-Numan,
Syria Incoming! 6 Tokyo Sorry Display 8 Baghdad Triple Slaughter 10 Fort McMurray, Alberta Burned Out
The Teenagers
PARIVARTAN SHARMA / REU TE RS
Ask a bedraggled parent “What do teens think?” and you just might get, “They think?” But what they know and feel and do is vitally important. After all, they are the future. Just maybe not yours. 34 Color Bind 44 Then & Now
What do teens want? Less racism. They were the faces of a generation... and are again, as they look back 50 years later.
Color Coded
56 Online
#NoDareTooStupid
60 Education
Harvard Can Wait
62 Books
Peggy Sue Got Sexted
64 Advice
We Were Teens Once
PAG E O N E 12 Politics
Trumping the Shark
COVER CREDIT: PHOTOGRAPH BY GANDEE VASAN/GETTY
16 Brazil
Newsweek (ISSN2052-1081), is published weekly except one week in January, July, August and October. Newsweek (EMEA) is published by Newsweek Ltd (part of the IBT Media Group Ltd), 25 Canada Square, Canary Wharf, London E14 5LQ, UK. Printed by Quad/Graphics Europe Sp z o.o., Wyszkow, Poland For Article Reprints, Permissions and Licensing www.IBTreprints.com/Newsweek
NEWSWEEK
The Decline and Fall of Dilma
1
0 5 / 2 7/ 2 0 1 6
FOR MORE HEADLINES, GO TO NEWSWEEK.COM
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
Jim Impoco DEPUTY EDITOR
Bob Roe
MANAGING EDITOR
EUROPEAN EDITOR
Kenneth Li
Matt McAllester
CO-FOUNDER, CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER
Etienne Uzac
CONTRIBUTING DESIGN DIRECTOR
Priest + Grace
CO-FOUNDER, CHIEF CONTENT OFFICER
INTERNATIONAL EDITOR
Claudia Parsons
MANAGING DIRECTOR, EMEA
Johnathan Davis
Dev Pragad
EUROPEAN EDITION EDITORIAL ASSOCIATE EDITOR TRAVEL EDITOR CONTRIBUTING EDITOR DIGITAL EDITOR DEPUTY ONLINE NEWS EDITOR SOCIAL MEDIA PRODUCER REPORTERS
Naina Bajekal PUBLISHED BY
Graham Boynton
Newsweek LTD,
Owen Matthews
A DIVISION OF
Serena Kutchinsky Graham Smith Valeriia Voshchevska Tufayel Ahmed
CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER
Lucy Clarke-Billings Anthony Cuthbertson Teddy Cutler Conor Gaffey
Dave Martin
GENERAL COUNSEL, EMEA
Jack Moore Tom Roddy
Rosie McKimmie
Damien Sharkov
PUBLIC RELATIONS DIRECTOR, EMEA
Harry Eyres
Sharon Ezzeldin
Nicholas Foulkes Adam LeBor
ADVERTISING
ART + PHOTO ART DIRECTOR ASSOCIATE ART DIRECTOR
COMMERCIAL DIRECTOR
Jeremy Makin
Michael Friel
SENIOR SALES DIRECTOR
Dwayne Bernard
DESIGNER
Jessica Fitzgerald
PHOTO DIRECTOR
Shaminder Dulai
PHOTO EDITORS
Chantal Mamboury GROUP ADVERTISING DIRECTOR
Una Reynolds
Jared T. Miller
SALES DIRECTOR
Gemma Bell
Jen Tse PRODUCTION MANAGER CONTRIBUTING DIGITAL DESIGNER CONTRIBUTING DIGITAL IMAGING SPECIALIST
SENIOR COMMERCIAL MANAGER
Helen J. Russell Tuomas Korpijaakko Katy Lyness
Max Kutner
Roberto Saviano
Jonathan Broder
Seung Lee
Zoë Schlanger
Nina Burleigh
Douglas Main
Zach Schonfeld
Janine Di Giovanni,
Leah McGrath Goodman
Jeff Stein
Kurt Eichenwald
Alexander Nazaryan
John Walters
Jessica Firger
Bill Powell
Lucy Westcott
Michele Gorman
Winston Ross
Taylor Wofford
Abigail Jones
Josh Saul
Stav Ziv
CONTRIBUTING EDITORS
Grant Burningham Matt Cooper Kevin Dolak
Nicholas Loffredo Margarita Noriega
MARKETING + CIRCULATION
Tom Nichols
Ryan Bort
Cady Drell
Pierce Cook-Anderson
SUBSCRIPTION MARKETING MANAGER
CONTRIBUTING WRITERS
Joanna Brenner
Gregory Witham GENERAL MANAGER
Mirren Gidda Josh Lowe
SPECIAL CORRESPONDENTS
IBT Media Group LTD
R.M. Schneiderman John Seeley Teri Wagner Flynn Elijah Wolfson
SUBSCRIPTION FULFILMENT MANAGER
Samantha Rhodes NEWSSTAND MANAGER
Kim Sermon
Join us for ten days of award-winning writers, great ideas and wonderful entertainment. Tickets available online at www.hayfestival.org or via our Box Office 01497 822629
BIG SHOTS
SYRIA
Incoming!
KHAL IL ASHAW I/ REUTERS
Maaret al-Numan, Syria—Children duck under desks during a war safety awareness class conducted by civil defense members in a rebel-held area on May 14. In addition to attacks by the Islamic State militant group (ISIS) and air bombings by President Bashar al-Assad’s regime and Russia, Syrians may soon have to contend with Al-Qaeda, according to U.S. and European intelligence and counterterrorism officials quoted by The New York Times. It reported that a dozen of Al-Qaeda’s most seasoned fighters have been dispatched to Syria in an effort to challenge ISIS for dominance in the region.
KHALIL ASHAWI
BIG SHOTS
JAPAN
Sorry Display
EUGENE HOSHIKO
EUGE NE HOSHIKO/AP
Tokyo—Mitsubishi Motors Chairman and CEO Osamu Masuko, center, and company President Tetsuro Aikawa, left, bow during a press conference on May 11 while apologizing for falsifying emissions data and announcing that the problem involved more cars than previously announced. Mitsubishi’s stock price has plunged and its reputation has taken a hit since it confessed in April to altering the fuel efficiency data of over 600,000 of its Japanese vehicles. In a potential lifeline to Mitsubishi, Nissan agreed to buy a 34 percent stake in its rival for $2.2 billion.
BIG SHOTS
IRAQ
Triple Slaughter
WISSM AL-OKILI
WISSM AL-OKILI/ REU TE RS
Baghdad—People gather at the scene of a car bomb attack in Sadr City, a mainly Shiite district, on May 11. Three car bombings claimed by the Islamic State group (ISIS) killed at least 93 people in the deadliest single day of attacks on Iraq’s capital this year. There is a security vacuum in Iraq as the government appears to be unraveling—the country’s parliament has been unable to hold meetings, and Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi is struggling to uproot extremists as well as to address economic and political problems left over from years of war.
JASON FRANSON/REUTERS
BIG SHOTS
CANADA
Burned Out
Fort McMurray, Alberta—Prime Minister Justin Trudeau looks into a burned car while visiting neighborhoods devastated by more than a week of wildfires, on May 13. The visit was Trudeau’s first to Fort McMurray since 88,000 people were forced to evacuate on May 4, when the blaze swept into the city, the hub of Canada’s oil sands industry. Low humidity, unseasonably warm weather and high winds caused by El Niño put the region at a high fire risk and raised concerns about climate change. The blaze destroyed 2,400 buildings, but officials said nearly 90 percent of the city is intact.
JASON FRANSON
P BRAZIL
A
G
POLITICS
E IRAN
O HEALTH
N MILITARY
E PESTS
TRUMPING THE SHARK
The GOP can survive this hostile takeover, but it’s going to take a major reboot MIKE TELLS DON his house is on fire. He adds that he will extinguish the blaze if Don pays him. Don forks over the money, but Mike does nothing. There are two possible explanations for this shocking betrayal: Mike was lying about the fire or he never planned to help Don. In that story, Mike is the Republican Party, and Don represents all the members of the Tea Party and their conservative think-alikes. And in this analogy lies the explanation for both the rise of Donald Trump and why the GOP elite is condemning him viciously. For years, Republican leaders have engaged in what might be called boogeyman politics. No claim was too crazy to justify their storyline that the Constitution had been set ablaze by Democrats: Barack Obama isn’t a real American, so he’s not legally the president; Obama committed crimes that demanded impeachment; Obama has secret plans to take away Americans’ guns; Obama wanted to murder the elderly and disabled through Obamacare; Obama maintained concentration camps operated by the Federal Emergency Management
NEWSWEEK
Agency. Texas Senator Ted Cruz even played footsy with the theory that Obama wanted to declare martial law in Texas and was planning to turn over vast swaths of American territory to the United Nations, which would then outlaw paved roads, grazing pastures and golf courses. In other words, Republicans have been telling Tea Partyers that the American house is on fire and that the GOP could douse the flames only if they send more conservatives to Washington. The tactic worked, bringing out the Tea Party and other conservative voters in 2010 and 2014, and Republicans won big gains in Congress. But then, where were the impeachment hearings? Why is Obamacare still a thing? Why aren’t Democrats being arrested for treason? Tea Party members still believe the lies they have been told about conspiracies and high crimes, and they have been seething that their representatives were doing nothing about the horrors they had promised to end. So these voters reached the conclusion that the Republicans had sold them out. The grousing conservative electorate was primed to revolt. A prominent GOP political consultant saw this
12
0 5 / 2 7/ 2 0 1 6
BY KURT EICHENWALD @kurteichenwald
+ THE PARTY’S OVER:
MARK PE TERSON/REDUX
GOP leaders fear that a Trump presidential campaign will take many other candidates down with it.
NEWSWEEK
13
0 5 / 2 7/ 2 0 1 6
+ BROCK THE VOTE:
NEWSWEEK
(R-Ariz.), Dean Heller (R-Nev.) and Ben Sasse (R-Neb.). Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) has been among the most vocal critics. “Lucifer is the only person Trump could beat in a general election,’’ he said on Face the Nation. “I believe Donald Trump’s foreign policy, his isolationism, will lead to another 9/11.” And then there is the most vexing question for Republican politicians: What does Trump, their presumptive nominee for president, stand for? Plenty of GOP members of Congress say they have never spoken to the man, and if they know him at all, it’s as the host of his reality-TV show The Apprentice or as a businessman who has worn a path from his penthouse to bankruptcy court. Senator James Lankford (R-Okla.) told reporters the one thing he wanted to hear from Trump was his policy positions. Asked which ones in particular, Lankford replied, “Everything.” Then there are the old reliable wedge issues: abortion, homosexuality, school prayer and the rest of the arrows in the Republicans’ culture quiver. Cruz, the conspicuously pious candidate in the presidential primaries who portrayed himself as a steadfast soldier in the culture war, lost much of the Bible Belt to a man with multiple divorces who backs Planned Parenthood and has spent endless hours with shock jock Howard Stern
14
0 5 / 2 7/ 2 0 1 6
Reagan pulled the GOP out of an abyss in 1980 by presenting new ideas and a new identity for the party pushed by its chair, Bill Brock.
CHARLES TASNAD I/AP
conflagration coming back in 2012. The party’s politicians “have to end their addiction to the crack cocaine of the Tea Party vote,’’ he told me then. Fueling the Tea Partyers’ suspicions and anger with conspiracy theories and terrifying falsehoods might drive them to the voting booth in droves, this consultant told me, but eventually they would turn on the party elite. After all, despite all the fearmongering, little changed after the elections. Fantasies can’t be fixed. Like any addict, the Republicans remained in denial about how bad things were getting with their Tea Party base. And now GOP politicians have hit bottom, waking up in the gutter to find that their party’s standard-bearer is a coarse, divisive businessman with no political experience who is celebrated by Tea Partyers. Meanwhile, Republican leaders are convinced he will create a tidal wave of losses for the GOP in November. The coolness to—and outright rejection of—Trump is widespread within the party. Paul Ryan, the speaker of the House, has not endorsed him. Representatives Barbara Comstock (R-Va.) and Ann Wagner (R-Mo.), both facing re-election, have said Trump has to earn their vote. Then there are those who have said they will not endorse Trump under any circumstances, including Senators Jeff Flake
bragging about his sexual escapades with models. It’s hard to feel much sympathy for the Republican elite now aligned with a man they despise, given that they created the monster. You reap what you sow; you made your bed, now lie in it; you pays your money and you takes your chances—our language is loaded with the clichés that point to why this should be a moment of schadenfreude rather than one of pity. There is a path to recovery for the Republicans. One of the greatest members of the GOP, the person who saved the party when it last lost its way, is a man whose name probably few Republicans will recognize: Bill Brock. A former senator from Tennessee, Brock was a darling of the conservative movement during his single term, from 1971 to 1977. After that, he took the reins of the Republican National Committee while the GOP was still reeling from the Watergate scandals. The party had just lost the White House; Democrats had control of the House of Representatives and had won a supermajority in the Senate, meaning no Republican filibuster could succeed. Faced with these dismal facts, Brock set about rebuilding the party. The Republicans had become bereft of an identity; voters had little concept of what the GOP brought to the table. Brock decided the party had to become one of ideas, not just an intransigent body that stood for little more than saying no. He heard that two members of Congress, Representative Jack Kemp (R-N.Y.) and Senator William Roth (R-Del.), were kicking around a plan for huge tax cuts, which they argued would spur massive economic growth that would boost revenue and avoid deficits. This idea, the foundation of supply-side economics, was embraced by Brock and became the subject of research reports and talking points sent to conservatives in Congress and statehouses. Eventually, it was adopted by Ronald Reagan as the centerpiece of his presidential campaign and then his administration, and it is often cited by Republicans as the greatest accomplishment of his presidency. Now, 36 years later, it remains the mantra of Republicans, even though the idea that tax cuts pay for themselves has been roundly debunked and is the biggest factor in America’s massive deficits and debt. Unfortunately, while most economists understand that sometimes interest rates need to be high and other times low, Republicans still seem to believe that tax rates should only go down. So what does the Republican Party stand for today? “No” is still the answer. Whatever the Democrats propose, the Republicans oppose— anti-abortion, anti-gay marriage and often anti-science. (Climate change denial is a meme NEWSWEEK
PAGE ONE/POLI T I C S
for Republicans, and increasing numbers of party members reject evolution.) Polls, such as one conducted recently by the Pew Research Center, show that younger voters, even Republicans, disagree with this agenda. Only 38 percent support smaller government with fewer services, according to another Pew poll. Now that they’ve been slapped upside the head by Trump, Republicans need another Bill Brock. They need to focus on new ideas, on what they have to offer to the next generation of voters. They need to stand for something other than culture wars, tax cuts and “We’re not Hillary!” It’s possible to broaden the Republican base by finding new conservative ideas that appeal to more than just the Tea Partyers, the angry and Bible Belt Christians. On the other hand, if they don’t think they need a Brock, perhaps they need a Tuchman. In her spectacular 1984 book, The March of Folly, historian Barbara Tuchman examines four times
“DONALD TRUMP’S FOREIGN POLICY, HIS ISOLATIONISM, WILL LEAD TO ANOTHER 9/11.” governments pursued policies against their own interests and set loose the yowling furies of chaos. By appealing to their bases’ basest instincts, the Republicans have done just that, and the evidence is one orange-haired, bombastic man who seems to be on cable news 24/7. Republicans need to self-assess and recognize that they created Trumpism by refusing to compromise and govern, by engaging in historic obstruction (such as the current blockade on hearings for Obama’s Supreme Court nominee) and, in every way, by continuing to act like petulant teenagers. They have indulged their own march of folly for eight years; the cliff they are heading toward is not far away.
15
0 5 / 2 7/ 2 0 1 6
THE DECLINE AND FALL OF DILMA
BACK IN MARCH 2014, when the scandal over Brazil’s state-run oil company Petrobras that would eventually topple the government was just getting started, some of President Dilma Rousseff ’s top aides saw a golden opportunity to kill the investigation—or at least badly wound it. Márcio Anselmo, the Federal Police deputy in charge of the probe, had given an interview to Jornal Nacional, Brazil’s most-watched news program. On-camera, Anselmo and others laid out the main points of the case, which would soon become notorious: a former Petrobras board member who had accepted a Land Rover as a bribe, the money launderer whose plea-bargain testimony would prove key and the bribes paid
NEWSWEEK
by some of the country’s biggest construction companies for lucrative Petrobras contracts. For Rousseff, the stakes were huge: The presidential election was just six months away, and she was facing a tight race. But some ministers were convinced the TV interview was a blessing in disguise. They believed Anselmo had broken a dictatorship-era statute that, they argued, prohibited Federal Police officials from discussing cases in progress with the media. Fire him, they urged Rousseff. Fire him now and attack the investigators for using the media to selectively leak information damaging to the government. To their astonishment, Rousseff refused. “I’ll never do that,” she replied dismissively, accord-
16
0 5 / 2 7/ 2 0 1 6
BY BRIAN WINTER @BrazilBrian
ADRIANO MACHADO/REUTERS
Brazil’s ousted president deserves some credit for backing corruption probes— even when they threatened her
+ UNDER SIEGE:
Rousseff and her chief of staff, Jaques Wagner, peer from the window of the presidential palace the day before the Senate voted to suspend her.
ing to someone who was in the room at the time. “I’m not afraid of this investigation. It has nothing to do with me!” I covered Rousseff closely for five years as a reporter, and if there’s a more “Dilma” anecdote out there, I don’t know it. This one has it all: her blustery arrogance, her refusal to listen to even her closest aides and her apparent inability to understand just how much trouble she was in, right to the very end. But it also reveals a side to Rousseff that should improve her standing in the annals of Brazilian history: her refusal, for the most part, to stand in the way of corruption investigations at Petrobras and elsewhere, even when it became clear they would contribute to her demise. Brazil’s Congress has now voted to remove Rousseff from office, almost certainly for good, so she can stand trial for breaking budget laws in a way that masked Brazil’s economic woes. She departs with a near-single-digit approval rating, primary responsibility for Brazil’s worst recession in at least 80 years and very few friends at home or abroad. And yet, Rousseff also deserves some credit for the main achievement of this otherwise horrid decade in Brazil: the consolidation of rule of law under its young democracy, as well as the notion that the corrupt will be investigated, convicted and jailed, no matter how powerful they may be. Acknowledging Rousseff ’s role in this achievement is controversial, in part because her behavior was also not impeccable here. Indeed, she may soon face charges for obstruction of justice for appointing her mentor and predecessor, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, as a minister in her final days in government at a time when prosecutors were seeking his arrest on corruption charges. Rousseff ’s move was widely seen as designed to make Lula less susceptible to imprisonment, since ministers enjoy special legal protections. But it may have been less an attempt to hinder the investigation itself and more an act of personal loyalty and realpolitik, based on the belief that only Lula had the negotiating prowess to save her government. Starting in early 2014, Rousseff had numerous opportunities to hinder, or at least delay, the investigation of Petrobras and other high-profile corruption cases targeting powerful people. The argument against Anselmo, the Federal Police deputy, seems in retrospect to be flimsy—but in any case Rousseff let the opportunity pass. She could have declined in 2015 to reappoint the attorney general, Rodrigo Janot, who had already shown he would go along with the so-called Lava
PAGE ONE/BRA Z I L
Jato (Operation Car Wash) probe. She not only retained Janot but also publicly reaffirmed his autonomy—a mandate he would soon seize upon by requesting charges against Lula and an investigation of Rousseff. Rousseff also could have put someone less apt to cooperate with prosecutors in charge of the Federal Police or actively pressed her allies on the Supreme Court to remove the Petrobras case from Judge Sérgio Moro, who is based in the city of Curitiba, on the argument that judges in Rio de Janeiro, where the company is based, were better-suited to handle it. Finally, she could have started attacking Moro as biased much earlier and more aggressively than she ultimately did. All along, Rousseff had senior figures within the Workers’ Party urging her to do all of these things. But instead, as recently as January of this year, she was publicly celebrating Lava Jato as a necessary purge of practices that had existed in Brazil for decades. “I have to emphasize the fact that Brazil needs this investigation,” she told the newspaper Folha de S.Paulo, limiting her criti-
“I’M NOT AFRAID OF THIS INVESTIGATION. IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH ME!”
NEWSWEEK
cism to procedural issues. Rousseff didn’t begin to vilify the investigation in earnest until a few weeks ago, when Moro released wiretapped conversations between her and Lula. And there… Well, let’s say she may have had a point. There are those who will never give Rousseff any credit for letting Brazil’s judiciary do its job. What choice did she have? they ask. OK. But ask yourself the following: Would leaders elsewhere in Latin America have done the same? What about recent governments in Argentina? Or Mexico? Not to mention China or Russia. For that matter, what can we expect from the incoming Michel Temer government in Brazil? Temer, who was Rousseff ’s vice president, is a
17
0 5 / 2 7/ 2 0 1 6
during her first year in office. This was a radical departure from the Lula years, and it contributed to a new culture that ultimately resulted in Lava Jato. Of course, there are other, much less flattering explanations. It’s clear that Rousseff, isolated and politically tone-deaf, failed until it was too late to fully grasp the threat to her survival. The Rousseff-as-earnest-technocrat theory also has a major hole in it: If she was so focused on numbers, how did she miss the sheer scale of the robbery at Petrobras, especially during the years she was energy minister and the chair of the company’s board? The answer probably lies in the simplest, most damning criticism of Rousseff: She just wasn’t that good. Mediocre to the end and overwhelmed by a position she was never qualified to hold, she consistently failed to ask the right questions of her aides or her party. She also harbored antiquated economic philosophies, believed she could dictate the day-to-day business of the country (including parts of the private sector) by personal fiat and alienated most people she worked with. Her presidency will go down as a case study in why leadership matters—
PAGE ONE/BRAZIL
75-year-old constitutional lawyer who will try to lead Brazil in a more business-friendly direction. But he comes from a different political party, several of whose leaders are also implicated in the Lava Jato probe. One irony of Rousseff ’s impeachment is that it may lead to more political interference in the Petrobras investigation. Temer has said there’s nothing to fear, but prosecutors in Curitiba and Brasília privately say they are preparing for setbacks. They may end up missing Rousseff most of all. So the final question: Why did she do it? Why did Rousseff stand by as her government fell apart? Some of the explanation probably lies in her origin story. Not the one we’ve all heard about— the Dilma Rousseff of her early 20s, the guerrilla who endured jail and torture. No, I’m talking about Dilma Rousseff the adult, after her release from prison in 1973, the one who undertook a much less glamorous life as an economist and public servant. This is the bespectacled energy policy wonk who just 20 years ago was editing an obscure magazine called Economic Indicators and never showed any interest in politics or higher office. This Rousseff ’s only passion was for numbers—performance targets, spreadsheets, the arcane day-to-day business of government. Even after Lula plucked her from nowhere to be his chief of staff and ultimately his successor, even after the plastic surgery and makeover that preceded Rousseff ’s run for president, she still had no time for anything but numbers. Unfortunately for Rousseff, this precluded her from making any friends, in Congress or elsewhere, who might have protected her toward the end. But it also made her intolerant of corruption— not for moral reasons, perhaps, but because it might keep the numbers in the G column on Excel from lining up correctly. From the very beginning of Rousseff ’s government, when a minister or other aide was accused of fraud, she made it clear that person was expected to resign. Six ministers left under such circumstances
ONE IRONY OF ROUSSEFF’S IMPEACHMENT IS THAT IT MAY LEAD TO MORE POLITICAL INTERFERENCE IN THE PETROBRAS INVESTIGATION.
NEWSWEEK
why a democracy as big and complex as Brazil’s cannot simply be handed over to anyone and put on “automatic pilot.” But Rousseff had virtues too. Even her enemies concede she was honest and stole nothing for herself. In a region where many leaders spend their waking hours scheming about how to make themselves or their friends richer or exact revenge on their enemies, Rousseff seemed genuinely focused on tackling Brazil’s still-legendary poverty and inequality. And in the end, any desire she had to stay in office or protect her party seems to have been outweighed by a long-term concern for Brazil and the need to build functioning institutions. That should count for something. This article was first published by Americas Quarterly, where BRIAN WINTER is the editor-in-chief.
18
0 5 / 2 7/ 2 0 1 6
TWO
NEW INVASIVE PESTS
introduced to the U.S. every decade
NUMBERS
ANNUAL COST
to taxpayers for damage caused by these organisms
Father Knows Pest
ILLUSTRATION BY JOHN S. DYKES
INVASIVE ORGANISMS ARE EATING U.S. TREES LIKE THEY’RE POTATO CHIPS
In the 20th century, chestnut blight and Dutch elm disease decimated billions of U.S. trees. The tree diseases, caused by invasive pests—a fungus spore from Japan and a beetle from the Netherlands—changed the face of one U.S. city landscape after another and cost local governments and homeowners a fortune. Today, 63 percent of U.S. forestland is at risk of increased damage from established pests like the emerald ash borer, hemlock wooly adelgid and others, according to the U.S. Forest Service. Urban and suburban trees are the costliest casualties.
Ecological Applications. The problem is growing; the study calculates that 25 new pests enter the country every decade. The trend is due to escalating trade and increased reliance on shipping containers. Almost all wood-boring insects that have recently invaded the U.S. entered on wood packaging materials within these containers. While the federal government requires that wood packaging material be treated to prevent pest importation, there are too many shipments coming in each day to inspect everything. The solution is to
Removal and replanting are expensive, and loss of trees from streets, yards and parks hurts property values and robs communities of the benefits, such as improved air quality. Those costs are not evenly distributed: Homeowners who have to remove dead trees from their properties are stuck with $1 billion of the costs compared with the federal government’s $216 million and the timber industry’s $150 million burdens. In total, established tree pests are costing Americans over $2 billion a year, according to a paper published May 10 in the journal
SOURCE: ECOLOGICAL APPLICATIONS
NEWSWEEK
19
0 5 / 2 7/ 2 0 1 6
phase out natural wood packing materials, says forest ecologist and study lead author Gary Lovett, and use alternatives like paper-based products. The stakes are already higher than most realize. Forest pests are the only threat that can decimate an entire tree species in decades. We’ve been lucky, Lovett says, not to have yet encountered an imported pest threat to the Southeast’s loblolly pine or the Northwest’s Douglas fir, two of the country’s most commercially important trees. BY CHRISTINA PROCOPIOU @chrisprocopiou
PA G E O N E/ I R AN
THE GREAT NUCLEAR DEAL MELTDOWN
Why the Iran accord could be unraveling USED CLOTHING, toiletries and gifts worth no more than $100—for a decade, these were among the few Iranian products allowed into the U.S., thanks to international sanctions. But when the Iran nuclear deal went into effect in January, Iran was suddenly allowed to resume exports of its famous Persian carpets and pistachios. Iranians also looked forward to reviving their oil industry and gaining access to tens of billions of dollars in previously frozen petroleum revenues. Perhaps most important, U.S. officials assured Tehran that foreign investment would return, finally ending Iran’s pariah status. ”As soon as we suspend our major sanctions,” Wendy Sherman, the lead U.S. negotiator, had said in 2014, “the world will flood into Iran.” Today, nearly six months after the deal was implemented, Iran is still waiting. It can’t get access to most of the estimated $100 billion it holds in foreign banks. The reason: U.S. laws, which weren’t included in the nuclear deal, are still highly restrictive. The foreign business hasn’t materialized because big European and Asian commercial banks are afraid they might inadvertently violate those non-nuclear U.S. sanctions and face hefty penalties. Tehran is angry and says Washington is preventing the country from rejoining the world economy. Iran wants the U.S. to relax these sanctions, but that would require Congress to act, something unlikely to happen in an election year, especially since even some Democrats are in no mood to revisit a deal many considered flawed. If anything, lawmakers are pushing for more sanctions, this time as punishment for Iran’s ballistic
NEWSWEEK
missile program. In Tehran, hard-liners, who never liked the deal, are urging moderate President Hassan Rouhani to scrap it. “The political space is closing,” says Tyler Cullis, a legal expert on the Iran nuclear deal and U.S. sanctions at the National Iranian American Council, a group that advocates for closer relations between the two countries. “The danger now is that [President Barack] Obama is going to leave office in six months with his signature foreign policy achievement on very shaky ground.” Both Tehran and Washington insist they’re committed to the accord. But Iran’s concerns and the prospect of the deal collapsing were evident in April, when Valiollah Seif, Iran’s central bank governor, made a rare visit to Washington for the meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. At a meeting with Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew, Seif demanded sanction relief. “They need to do whatever is needed to honor their commitments,” the Iranian banker said at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a Washington-based think tank. “Otherwise, the [nuclear deal] breaks up under its own terms.” Probably the biggest source of friction is a U.S. law that bars Iran from using the U.S. financial system and the American dollar, even indirectly. The law, enacted in 2012, was aimed at punishing Iran for a variety of alleged sins: the country’s ballistic missile program, human rights abuses and state-sponsored terrorism. Because these issues haven’t been resolved, there is virtually no chance Congress would repeal the law in the foreseeable future. As long as that statute remains in place, foreign banks
20
0 5 / 2 7/ 2 0 1 6
BY JONATHAN BRODER @BroderJonathan
Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, which oversees sanctions. Experts say foreign banks are reluctant to engage with Iran for other reasons, such as outdated laws governing money laundering, as well as its lack of prohibitions against terrorist financing and corruption. “Because of a lack
“AS SOON AS WE SUSPEND OUR MAJOR SANCTIONS, THE WORLD WILL FLOOD INTO IRAN.” of transparency, it would be hard to have certainty that you’re not dealing with someone subject to sanctions or engaged in illicit activity,” says Katherine Bauer, a former Iran specialist at the Treasury Department. As Tehran waits to see if the administration can ease the banks’ concerns, opponents of the deal have been as voluble as ever. Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, calls the agreement “disgusting” and the negotiators who crafted it “incompetent.” Hillary Clinton, the Democratic front-runner, has put more emphasis on the tough measures she’d take to counter Iran’s anti-U.S. policies rather than expressing support for the deal. Meanwhile, an influential lobby, United Against Nuclear Iran, is leading a campaign to discourage European companies from doing business with Tehran. On Capitol Hill, some lawmakers are pressuring Boeing to pull out of a reported deal to provide Iran with passenger jets and other services. And in one more blow to Iran, American pistachio growers convinced the administration to slap a 200 percent tariff on Iranian pistachios, effectively eliminating them from the U.S. market. Earlier this month, as controversy surrounding the nuclear deal continued to swirl, Kerry rejected any suggestion that the next president might scrap it. Perhaps. But on this issue, Iran gets a vote too. And if the promises of the accord remain unfulfilled, it’s not clear how long that country’s embattled moderates can keep the deal—and Obama’s legacy—alive. California pistachios, anyone?
+ STILL WAITING:
EB RAHIM NOROOZ I/AP
Iranians were hoping for an economic boost, but so far companies have been slow to commit, fearful of violating U.S. laws that restrict Iran from using the U.S. banking system.
holding Iran’s funds in dollars will be wary of doing business with the country. In April, Secretary of State John Kerry met with his Iranian counterpart, Mohammad Javad Zarif, in New York to try to resolve some of these issues. They reportedly agreed on an arrangement under which several European banks will process the transfer of roughly $6.4 billion worth of Indian oil payments to Tehran. According to Cullis, the Iran sanctions expert, the arrangement also will cover the transfer of Iran’s oil revenues locked up in Asian banks. The Obama administration insists U.S. law isn’t standing in the way of foreign banks doing business with Iran in other currencies—provided they aren’t dealing with sanctioned Iranian groups, such as companies linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Over the past few weeks, Kerry and other U.S. officials have spread out across the globe to help foreign bankers understand the maze of Iran sanctions. But so far, major European and Asian banks haven’t been mollified. Many have asked for clear guidelines from Washington so they don’t find themselves facing penalties like the nearly $9 billion fine that the French bank BNP Paribas paid in 2014 for violating U.S. sanctions against Iran, Sudan and Cuba. U.S. officials won’t provide specific guidelines, saying instead that if banks have a question, they should direct it to the U.S. NEWSWEEK
21
0 5 / 2 7/ 2 0 1 6
In the north Indian city of Gurgaon, a young woman hopes education will be her exit ticket from a life of service
B Y S O M I N I S E N G U P TA
GUT TER CREDIT
THE E ND OF KARMA NEWSWEEK
23
0 5 / 2 7/ 2 0 1 6
IN HER NEW BOOK, The End of Karma: Hope and Fury Among India’s Young, Somini Sengupta, a former New Delhi bureau chief for The New York Times, explores today’s India through portraits of seven young people who, despite many obstacles, aspire to mobility and opportunity. Here, Newsweek excerpts the story of Varsha, a high school student and daughter of a laundryman.
In her head, day and night, she hears a hot, impatient voice: I am not bound by my past. I make me. Varsha’s ambitions alternately bemuse her father and make him sick with worry. There is no chance of her becoming a cop, as far as he is concerned. By the time she is 20, he intends to find her a husband—from a good family, from the same caste, with a capacity to earn and to protect his child. Varsha regards her papa as her ally, but he is also her obstacle. He loves her, but he also sabotages her. He too wants her to break free of her past—but not too much. She keeps pushing the bounds, and he has to figure out how far to let her go. Varsha is one among many in this situation. Across India, where for centuries a life’s possibilities were circumscribed by the caste into which you were born, housemaids, sharecroppers and bricklayers are sending their children to school like never before. In primary school, there is almost universal enrollment, and for the first time in the country’s history, girls are as likely to be enrolled in primary school as boys. On every reporting trip across India, I am struck by this remarkable shift, and when I ask their mothers why they bother, I hear answers as vague as this: I will educate my daughter because I want her life to be different from mine. The stakes are higher now than ever before. Shortly after 2022, India is expected to surpass China and become the world’s most populous nation. In India, the median age in 2015 was 27. (In China, the comparable figure was 35; in the United States, 37.) The freedom that was promised in 1947, when India won its independence
THE LAND OF AND YET SATURDAY NIGHT, suburban Gurgaon, 20 miles southwest of New Delhi. The sky turns from blue to black, the burnt-toast smell of fireworks blows across the ravine, and tall, broad-shouldered Varsha hauls a hot-coal iron over the shimmering finery of others. Quietly, quickly, she presses the wrinkles out of a brushed pink chiffon salwar-kameez, a traditional Indian outfit of loose trousers and a tunic top, followed by three button-up white dress shirts. Her cellphone trills. “Yes, didi [sister]. It’s almost ready. Send your driver in 10 minutes.” Didi is a customer with a wedding to attend, perhaps several, since it is wedding season. Firecrackers begin to boom-snap in the distance. They will go on past midnight. It is Varsha’s job to make sure didis don’t show up to their parties all rumpled. And so she presses their clothes, places them on hangers, one after the other, racing against the clock. Left hand on cloth, right hand on iron, she removes every crease, every wrinkle. If only she could press away her worries this way, I think. Varsha, at 17, is every bit the dreamer. She was born to a family of modest means, to a community of dhobis, washermen whose ritual occupation is to clean other people’s dirty clothes. The advent of washing machines has tweaked the
A million young men and women turn 18 every month in India.
caste norms. Dhobis have become press-wallahs. They take rumpled piles of machine-washed clothes, press them, fold them and return them to their owners. Varsha wants to rise. She aspires to go to college and to one day be financially independent. She dreams of being a cop, gold stars on her shoulders, capable of protecting herself from the louts out there who harass and abuse girls. This desire becomes all the more urgent after her country is roiled by the gang rape of a young woman in late 2012. NEWSWEEK
from British rule, quietly settled in the Indian imagination. Democracy has anchored itself in the minds of India’s young. It speaks to the triumph of an audacious idea. A million young men and women turn 18 every month. They go out in search of work and dignity. They push their leaders to deliver. And yet. India is the land of And Yet. Ramachandra Guha, the leading historian of modern India, calls India a “50-50
24
0 5 / 2 7/ 2 0 1 6
+
ANDRE A BRUCE / THE NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX; PREVIOUS SPRE AD: SCOT T EELLS/REDUX
OUTCAST: Geeta, right, has been ostracized by her community in Peepli Khera for working at a meat-processing factory after village elders said women should not work.
ways: genuine equality of opportunity, dignity for girls and civil liberties for all. It pushes India to keep its promise. Aspiration is like water. It needs a place to go, or else it drowns everything in its path.
democracy.” I take this to mean that it works about as well as it doesn’t. By 2030, India is projected to reach its demographic sweet spot. That’s when the majority of its population will be working age, with a relatively small share of children and elderly to care for. But India’s demographic challenge is complicated by one peculiarity: According to the 2011 census, for every 1,000 boys born, there are only 919 girls. This represents the sharpest gender imbalance in India’s history—one measure of the country’s steady degradation of daughters that starts in the womb. This degradation is also the source of turmoil, as young women begin to push, in great numbers, against the rules and ways that hold them back. The more they push, the more violently they are pushed back, often by men as young and hungry as they are. And this is the tension that prevails in India. Today’s youth are a tipping-point generation that makes new demands on India’s democracy in at least three important NEWSWEEK
HER EXIT TICKET VARSHA’S FATHER, Madan Mohan, is a pioneer in Gurgaon. He moves to the new city in 1998. Varsha is a baby then, and Gurgaon is too. The very first suburban villas come up. A smattering of gated communities are under construction. In the pressing business, location is everything. And being first in this emerging suburb gives Madan Mohan a chance to corner the market early. He establishes a press stand, which is no more than a flat piece of tin held up by four sturdy bamboo poles. Madan Mohan is sure of one thing about the dhobi
25
0 5 / 2 7/ 2 0 1 6
+
DON’T HOLD ME DOWN: Police detain demonstrators after the release of the youngest of six men responsible for the 2012 gang rape of a woman on a bus in Delhi.
business. He wants none of his children to inherit it. Nor does he want his daughters to marry into it. A dhobi’s wife must work all day, standing over a hot iron, which means that by the time she gets home, she is too tired to do much housework. A woman is better off staying in the house, in his view, looking after the children. And anyway, a dhobi’s work is neither easy nor valued. You work outside all
When Varsha is 6, he finds a school for her. It is ideal for his purposes. It is nearby. It costs nothing. And classes are held in afternoons, which means Varsha can help her mother in the mornings and then go to school. What a boon it turns out to be for Varsha. The school is run by a charity. And the reason it holds classes in the afternoons is that it borrows space from one of the posh
“I am not bound by my past. I make me.”
day—in the heat, in the rain, in the cold. And at the end of it, he says, a greedy developer can come and toss you out. “I have been pressing clothes all my life,” he says. “The main thing I want for my children is that they do something better.” It is a bland answer to a bland question about his hopes for Varsha, but it fills Varsha’s eyes with tears to hear her father speak this way. She turns around and buries her head in his shoulder, which catches him by surprise. He awkwardly pats her on the back. NEWSWEEK
private schools serving Gurgaon’s privileged. In the morning come the children of bankers and ad executives. In the afternoon stream in the children of dhobis and drivers. The school is blessed with all the things that the neighborhood government-run school lacks: tables and chairs, educational posters on the walls, teachers who show up to work. Classes are conducted in English. Varsha loves it. School becomes her refuge. It is where she can prove her mettle. It is where she finds beauty, in song and dance and
26
0 5 / 2 7/ 2 0 1 6
poetry. School becomes her exit ticket from the press stand. By the time Varsha is 14 (when I first met her), in the winter of 2010, she and her mother do most of the pressing. Her younger sisters, Neetu and Megha, pick up and deliver. Badal, the first son in the family, born after three daughters, mostly plays. The baby suckles at his mummy’s breast. Varsha juggles the pressing among her many other obligations. It falls on her to roll chapatis [flatbread] every evening, dozens of them, one after the other—and so many do they all eat, she says, her family of seven, that by the time she is done, she has little energy left for homework. She worries about exams. She worries about the useless government school where Badal and Megha are enrolled. She worries about a useless boy she likes, who has no ambition to speak of, but whom she talks to quietly on her cellphone
DO NOT DEFY VARSHA GROWS into a young woman at a time when the safety of women and girls takes center stage in the public life of her country. It fills her father with foreboding, and he tries to rein her in even more. And it makes her all the more determined to become a cop. It suits her personality, she tells me. It’s true. She’s bossy—in a really good way. Fearless and tough. A girl born to more privilege might be described as a leader. Varsha’s father is pleased with her progress at school, but not always. He worries she is becoming too independent. “She is growing wings,” he complains to her school principal, Raji Nambissan. “She’s talking back.” He also tells the principal what happened to his niece
FROM LE FT: ADNAN ABIDI/ REUTE RS; AMIT DAVE / REUTERS
Two out of three women in New Delhi said they were subjected to sexual harassment between two and five times during the past year.
who got too much schooling, went off to college and fell in love with a boy from another caste. The girl ran away and eloped with him. It caused a scandal in the family. Nambissan, an unflappable woman with nearly three decades of experience in dealing with parents of many varieties, tells me there is little she can do to change the minds of men like Varsha’s father. Education is a double-edged
every night. She worries that if she keeps on with it, there will be terrible consequences. “Papa will kill me,” she says. Varsha’s father takes his responsibilities seriously. He tries to protect her from harm. At the same time, he is the chief enforcer of the very traditions that circumscribe her dreams. He keeps putting up fences around her. He keeps stopping her from becoming who she can be. Varsha is a child in an impossible situation. She has gulped the Kool-Aid of aspirational India. Deep inside, she believes she can make something of herself. She is convinced school is her best exit strategy. And so she has risen to all its demands: studied, scored well on the critical exams, become captain of the girls volleyball team. She has risen to the demands of family too: hung towels to dry, helped with dinner, made sure her siblings do their homework, made sure Mummy takes her medicines and smoothed out crease after crease after crease. Not a child and still a child. I get Varsha. She is like so many girls I have known. Obedient and dutiful, we keep our heads down and do as we’re told. We mostly follow the rules, but we dream of escape. Despair catches us when we least expect it, and we wonder why. NEWSWEEK
+
INDIA’S FUTURE: The 2012 gang rape on a Delhi bus resonated deeply across India, sparking protests and calls for reforms to protect women.
27
0 5 / 2 7/ 2 0 1 6
sword for men like him, she says. They want their girls to be educated, but they don’t want their girls to think for themselves. Nambissan takes pains to point out that this applies not just to Varsha’s class of poor people. It is also true of her own, more privileged social class. “Choop raho ghar-pay. That’s the attitude,” she says. It literally means “be quiet at home,” which also means: do not defy. “I call it a civilized way of slavery,” the principal continues. “They’re ready to give exposure to education. But there’s a limit. They don’t want them to argue.” Nambissan is not starry-eyed. This is what I most like about her. She says the school tries its best to arm its students with basic skills to survive in the modern economy—chiefly, the ability to communicate in English. Most of these kids want to graduate from college, but Nambissan knows they will need much more. A college degree is no guarantee of a steady paycheck for most Indians of Varsha’s generation. Nambissan is convinced they will need to learn a marketable trade, which is not part of the formal school curriculum. A few of them, perhaps a handful of the truly gifted kids, will triumph academically, she says. Not many. So what about Varsha? I ask. Nambissan is blunt. Varsha is a hard worker, she tells me, but she is not intellectually exceptional. She is a leader, but also a hothead. In the end, Nambissan says, her fate depends on what her father has in store for her—and how hard she pushes back. Nambissan’s school does not nurture idle dreams. So when Varsha first tells her teachers she wants to be a psychologist, as a way to help women like her mother, her teachers discourage her. Too much math, they warn, too much studying. You won’t be able to manage, they say. For a while, Varsha wants to be a dancer. “My heart’s dream is to be a dancer” is how she puts it. “I forget that dream. My father won’t allow it.” It becomes a pattern. A burst of ambition. A splash of cold water. A new burst of ambition. Kindly adjust. Tamp down your dreams. “First, Papa said no to college,” she says quietly. “Then my feelings also changed.” The policewoman idea is sealed into her brain after she and Papa listen to a speech by one of Gurgaon’s assistant police commissioners, a woman who describes growing up in a mud house in a village, studying hard for the police service exam, rising up the ranks. Varsha thinks: If she can do it, why can’t I? She looks over at Papa. She sees that he is applauding enthusiastically when the policewoman finishes speaking. He is beaming. But when she broaches the idea of taking the Indian Police Service examination, Papa is the opposite of NEWSWEEK
+
SEPARATE BUT EQUAL? Some train compartments like
this one in Mumbai are reserved for women and girls in an effort to make travel safer for them.
beaming. No way, he tells her. How would he find a husband for her? Imagine. A daughter-in-law packing a pistol! No respectable family would allow that.
VARSHA IS 16 when she learns that a young woman, just a few years older than her, was gang-raped not far from Varsha’s home, on the southern edge of Delhi. The woman was not so different from Varsha: ambitious, smart, hard-working, studying to be a physiotherapist and poised to leap from a life of working with hands to working with head. It happened on December 16, 2012, when the city shivered from a cold spell and the smell of coal fires hung low in the night air. The woman was home from college for the holidays that Sunday. She had met a friend, a young man who worked as an information technology specialist. They had gone to the mall to see a movie everyone was talking about, Life of Pi. On the way home, she was assaulted by five men, plus a juvenile, who had been joyriding all night on a private bus. They jammed a steel rod inside her, which perforated her intestines. They beat her male friend. They threw them both on the road, naked. The woman on the bus lived long enough to tell her story to the police. Two weeks later, she suffered massive organ failure and died. By then, protests have broken out in city after city. Day after day, women and men, most of them young, braved the cold to come out into the streets of Delhi and sometimes also braved the water cannons of riot police. “Azaadi,” they chanted, which is the word for
28
0 5 / 2 7/ 2 0 1 6
NAVESH C HITRAK AR /REUTERS
F R E E D O M AT D AY ! F R E E D O M AT N I G H T !
“freedom” in Hindi. “Freedom at day. Freedom at night.” There had been other widely publicized sexual assaults before. The streets of Delhi, the country’s capital, are notoriously unfriendly for women. A 2010 study by an advocacy group called Jagori found that two out of three women in New Delhi said they were subjected to sexual harassment between two and five times during the previous year. Still, the December 2012 gang rape resonated widely because the woman on the bus was so much like so many of her generation—the very portrait of aspiration. She was raised in a working-class warren in Delhi. Her father worked as a baggage handler at the airport. In newspaper accounts, neighbors described her as a studious child, the family’s hope, the one who was on her way to getting out of the ghetto and making something of herself. Her parents believed in her. They had sold a patch of land back in their village to pay her college fees. One of her college professors described her as “punctual and hardworking.” I make a note of this, and think about Varsha. It isn’t just the woman on the bus who was emblematic of her generation. So too were her rapists. They lived in a tin-roof ghetto in the center of Delhi, encircled by five-star hotels. They were mostly in their 20s. They had all come from the countryside for a better life in the city. They were all uneducated and marginally employed. “There was nothing very extraordinary about them,” The Guardian pointed out in a richly reported portrait of these men. Police arrested the six almost immediately. There were angry calls for them to be hanged. One was found dead in a Delhi jail cell. Four were sentenced to death; they are appealing. The juvenile among them was sentenced to a maximum jail term of three years. The protests that sprang from the gang rape seem to catch politicians completely off guard. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, the father of three accomplished daughters, didn’t speak out for the first several days, nor did the head of the ruling Congress party, Sonia Gandhi. The depth of outrage, especially among the young, seemed lost on them. Several other politicians, when they did speak out, showed themselves to be woefully out of touch with the
“Can one hand clap? I don’t think so.” With public anger boiling, the government appointed a committee of retired jurists to recommend how to address violence against women. The committee produced a remarkable report. It called out political and religious leaders for “gender bias”; it faulted police and courts for failing to protect women from harassment and assault; and it recommended overhauling laws dealing with rape and sexual harassment. It went on to remind India’s leaders of the promise made at independence and listed all the ways in which women had been cheated, concluding bluntly: “de facto equality guaranteed by the Constitution has not become a reality for them.” In the face of persistent protests, the Parliament quickly passed a batch of new laws to stiffen penalties for assaults against women. The protests drew attention to campaigns by women’s groups to make Indian cities safer by doing simple things: installing better streetlights near bus stops and subway entrances, repairing sidewalks, making sure public toilets are clean. And the protesters called for female cops— many, many more female cops.
ABORTED FEMALE FETUSES IN MAY 2013, Varsha nails her Class 10 exams, earning the second highest score in her class. Papa agrees to let her enroll in a local high school, but insists that she wear only trousers. He softens that stance after a few months, but keeps a tight leash on her. No going to the library after school. No going to a friend’s house, not even to do homework together. Varsha does not stop goading Papa to let her take the police service exams. There are practical upsides, she tells him. Women are in high demand in the police force since the December 2012 gang rape. The Delhi government promises to hire thousands of female cops, so each police station in the city can be staffed by at least a dozen women.
“I call it a civilized way of slavery.”
It is hard to imagine another profession in which a grown-up Varsha would feel safer. Varsha makes this case to Papa too. He is not convinced. No daughter of his is going to become a cop. It is not that he doesn’t love her. He loves her fiercely. He wants her to have a good life. He wants no harm to come to her, which is precisely why he cannot let her pursue this foolishness. He tells her he will find a husband for her by the time she is 20. If the in-laws let her work—
sentiments of a generation. A politician in Rajasthan, where Varsha’s people are from, proposed that skirts be outlawed as part of school uniforms. (A poll conducted in late 2012 by the Hindustan Times found that half of all Indian men between the ages of 18 and 25 said a woman in a short skirt was inviting trouble.) A Hindu religious leader suggested that the victim was to blame too, because she didn’t sufficiently implore her attackers to stop. Penetration, he asserted, requires the actions of two individuals. NEWSWEEK
29
0 5 / 2 7/ 2 0 1 6
say, at a bank—she can work. She pleads with Papa to let her take a dance class. He says no; it won’t fetch a job. She wants to learn to play guitar. Waste of time, he tells her. Varsha seeks beauty. Papa is consumed by fear. That evening, during wedding season, when the burnt-toast smell of fireworks lingers in the air, she seems more dejected than I have ever seen her. “Now I’ve changed my dreams. In my heart, it’s still there: Can I become a police officer?” she said. “But when I see my family situation, my confidence gets down.” The Constitution of India, which went into effect in 1950, enshrined equal franchise for men and women. This was an extraordinary edict for a society in which women like my grandmother ate only after the men of the family— and then the children—had had their fill. Many women still do. Equally extraordinary is that, since then, India’s lawmakers have passed specific measures designed to redress the marginalization of women in life and politics. The economic reforms that began in 1991 created new private-sector job opportunities, for men and women both, and with them, new social norms. Education was the most obvious example. Illiterate mothers began to send their girls to school, knowing that only an education could improve the girls’ chances of getting a job and of getting a husband with a job. The opening of the economy also created new kinds of jobs. As private airlines sprouted, women could work as flight attendants as well as pilots. They could legally work
Sex determination tests are illegal, but this law, like so many others, seems to have been flouted routinely. Girls are also far more likely to be abandoned and put up for adoption. A girl’s chances of surviving past her fifth birthday are slimmer than a boy’s. That could be because she is not fed as well or is not as likely to be taken to the doctor when she falls sick. I find it hard to be hopeful about whether this attitude will turn around. Valerie Hudson and Andrea Den Boer, two academics who study gender issues worldwide, conclude that the status of women and girls in India reflects “the profound devaluation of female life.”
SHARING HORROR STORIES EVER SINCE the 2012 gang rape, I have been asked repeatedly: Are women more likely to be raped in India than in other countries? No. There is no data to suggest that’s the case. It is pretty much impossible to get sound data on the incidence of rape and other forms of violence against women—in India and in many, many other countries. Stigma runs high. Reporting remains low. Police and prosecutors can be ignorant or insensitive or both. What we do know is that the reported rates of violence against women in India roughly mirror the rates of vio-
“I want that girls should be able to walk on the road at any time.”
lence women face worldwide. The World Health Organization, which looked at survey data from around the world, found that roughly one in three women—35 percent—said that in their lifetimes they had experienced “intimate partner violence and/or non-partner sexual violence.” One in 10 girls under the age of 18 was forced to have sex, a separate study found. What is true about rape in India is also true about rape elsewhere. First, rape survivors are not always keen to file a crime report. And second, their assaulters are usually men they know—friends, neighbors or family members. What is notable about India is that rape in particular— and violence against women in general—has seized the public imagination. Girls and women are refusing to keep quiet about it anymore. They are pouring into the streets to protest, sometimes braving water cannons. And many more of them are filing police reports. In Delhi, there were 1,493 rapes reported to police in the first 11 months of 2013, more than double the number reported in the same period of 2012. Complaints of sexual harassment went up sharply too.
as bartenders, after the Supreme Court in 2007 overturned a colonial-era law that had prohibited women in New Delhi, from mixing drinks. Armies of women went to work at call centers. But social norms for women working outside the home were oddly slow to change. While girls’ education soared and the economy grew rapidly, women’s participation in the labor force actually went down. Less than 30 percent of women worked for a living in 2011, placing India near the bottom among 131 countries with available data. When I posted an essay on Facebook about how this would hold back India’s economic advance, Varsha clicked “like.” For every story that testified to improvements, there was another that spoke of degradation. India has one of the most skewed sex ratios in the world. A study published in The Lancet, an international public-health journal, estimated that between 1990 and 2005, up to 12 million female fetuses were aborted. That was the period when ultrasound machines became increasingly accessible, enabling many more parents to learn the sex of the fetus. NEWSWEEK
30
0 5 / 2 7/ 2 0 1 6
Nationally, there was already a steady uptick in reported crimes against women. Between 2006 and 2010, the total number of reported crimes against women, including rape, increased by 29.6 percent, according to national crime records. That did not necessarily mean that incidents of rape had gone up. It likely signaled that women reported them more often. All of which is to say, a once hidden problem—particularly in the countryside, where rape has long been a way for upper-caste men to subjugate lower-caste women— was becoming less hidden. The December 2012 gang rape seemed to have emboldened survivors. In June 2013, a 37-year-old Calcutta woman appeared on television and described how she had been gang-raped over a year ago, and how she had only now felt brave enough to speak about it. In August, a photojournalist in Mumbai went to police to report that she was gangraped by five men at an abandoned industrial building. A receptionist came forward and said she had been assaulted by the same men but hadn’t filed a report out of shame. (The men said they were innocent in court.) My friend, the writer and editor Priya Ramani, wrote pointedly in the financial paper Mint: “This will be known as the year rapists, sexual molesters, perverts, predators and assorted other Indian creeps realized they can no longer count on that one big assumption that makes them so brazen: Indian women don’t like sharing horror stories.”
every turn. He is a product of the very traditions that she is trying to outrun. School isn’t enough of an exit strategy. Reluctantly, Varsha signs up to take business and economics classes in Class 11. Papa has it in his mind that bank jobs are good jobs for young women. A teacher mentions there are jobs in accounting. So she signs up for an accounting class. It is a breeze for her. It is also boring. Every hour spent on accounting homework, she begins to see as an hour away from preparing for her police service exams. I briefly consider printing out a police application for Varsha—and then decide against it. It is her life. This is her father. She tells me she intends to finish Class 12 and look for a job as soon as possible. She intends to enjoy a year or two of freedom before her father marries her off. Maybe, just
U N E X P E C T E D LY GOOD NEWS +
MANSI THAPLIYAL / REUTE RS
VARSHA, at 18, says the one thing she
PREVENTIVE MEASURES: Aanchal Sukhija, a 19-year-old student, sends a text message to her father any time she takes an auto rickshaw so he can keep track of her.
wants the new government to focus on is women’s safety. “I want that girls should be able to walk on the road at any time,” is how she puts it. I could tell you about the many girls in India who are so anemic, hungry or beaten down—or all of the above—that they can’t even imagine studying psychology or learning to dance or enforcing the law. I tell you about Varsha because she does imagine it. Vividly. Varsha is bright and headstrong, but her ambitions are repeatedly doused. Her resilience is repeatedly tested. She has had to rewrite her dreams, again and again, all because it would be unthinkable for her to cross the line, to defy her papa. I try to be sympathetic to her father but find it difficult. He knows she is special, that she is smarter and more driven than all his other children. He relies on her to help run the household. He guards her. He also thwarts her at NEWSWEEK
maybe, she can persuade her would-be in-laws to let her continue to work. That way, she could at least stand on her own two feet. That will have to be her escape. Ah, but stubborn, smart Varsha. At the end of May 2015, she nails her final exams, scoring well above the 80th percentile, which nudges her papa to let her chase her dreams a bit longer. He says she can go to a university in Delhi! This is unexpectedly good news, and they are discussing the details of her commute. She is trying to allay his fears about when and how she will walk back home from the metro station. In the back of her mind, she is still plotting to take the Indian Police Service exam, still pushing Papa every step of the way.
31
0 5 / 2 7/ 2 0 1 6
THE
TEEN
ASK A BEDRAGGLED PARENT “WHAT DO TEENS THINK?” AND YOU MIGHT GET, “THEY THINK?” SURE, THEIR BRAINS ARE STILL DEVELOPING, AND THEIR THUMBS MAY BE STIFF FROM TEXTING, BUT WHAT THEY KNOW AND FEEL AND DO IS VITALLY IMPORTANT.
IN 1966, Newsweek published a landmark cover story, “The Teen-Agers: A Newsweek Survey of What They’re Really Like.” The 18-page article examined the teen world in fine detail: their heroes,
politics, sexual proclivities and shopping habits, as well as what they thought about N N EE W W SS W W EE EE K K
education, the world and their future. The article was based on an extensive survey of nearly 800 girls and boys across the country, conducted by famous pollster Louis
32 32
0055//227/ 7/22001166
Harris and Associates, and it also profiled six teens in depth, including a black teen growing up in Chicago, a
ILLUSTRATION BY SACHIN TENG
AFTER ALL, THEY ARE THE FUTURE. JUST MAYBE NOT YOURS
AGERS California girl and an Iowa farm boy. Fifty years later, Newsweek
set out to discover what’s changed for American teenagers and what’s stayed the same. For a generation that’s growing up online, coming of age with the first black U.S. N NE EW W SS W WE EE EK K
president and witnessing the rise of Donald Trump’s divisive politics, the teenagers of today are optimistic about yet
33
0 0 55 // 22 7/ 7/ 220 0 1166
wary of their futures. Newsweek also tracked down all six teens profiled in 1966 to find out how their lives have unfolded over the past 50 years. This is the story of teens and race in America today.
T E E N A G
E
E
TH
R
S
COLOR BIND
BY ABIGAIL JONES
WHAT DO TEENS WANT? LESS RACISM
GROWING UP IN THE PROJECTS OF CHICAGO’S SOUTH SIDE IN THE 1960S, TOMMY BREWER USED TO WATCH ABC’S THE FBI ON SUNDAY NIGHTS WITH HIS FATHER. “I said one day, out of excitement, ‘I wanna be an FBI agent!’” recalls Brewer. “And my father said, ‘You’re not allowed in the FBI. They don’t allow blacks to be FBI agents.’” Brewer’s father was a steelworker with a sixthgrade education, and his mother didn’t make it past the fifth grade. But Brewer, surrounded by gang violence, was convinced an education would get him wherever he wanted to go. So each morning, he took two buses and an L train to Lindblom Technical High School, where he got A’s (and one B) and took honors courses. He dreamed of going to college and studying architectural engineering. “If teenagers have the right education, they won’t have any problems,” he told Newsweek in 1966, when he was 15. “The gang members were taught this, but it just didn’t sink in.… When they get to be 18 and it’s time to get a job, then they find out that they need a good high school education to land one. So crime is the easiest way out. There’s no pressure like there is in school.” Brewer’s story was part of a landmark 1966 cover story, “The Teen-Agers: A Newsweek Survey of What They’re Really Like,” that investigated the teen world in fine detail: their heroes, politics, spending habits and sexual proclivities, as well as what they thought about the world, their parents and their future. The article was old-school journalism at its best: Correspondents in Newsweek bureaus fanned out across the country, interviewing hundreds of teens as well as parents, psychologists, principals and other experts, while pollster Louis Harris and Associates conducted an extensive survey of 775 teens. Newsweek also profiled six teens in depth: a farm boy from Iowa, a California girl, a Manhattan prepster, a free spirit from Berkeley, a middle-school girl in Houston and Brewer. This past fall, in anticipation of the 50th anniversary of “The Teen-Agers,” Newsweek enlisted Harris Poll to conduct an online survey replicating key questions in the original work and to expand on it. We asked 2,057 teens, ages 13 to 17, from diverse backgrounds and geographic areas, about everything from politics and education to parents, sex, mental health and pop culture. The result, “The State of the American Teenager,” offers fascinating and sometimes disturbing insights into a generation of teens who are plugged in, politically aware and optimistic about their futures yet anxious about their country. Two-thirds of teens (68 percent), for example, believe the United States is on the wrong track, and 59 percent think pop culture keeps the country from talking about the news that really matters. Faith in God or some other divine being dropped from 96 percent in 1966 to 83 perNEWSWEEK
cent. Twice as many teens today feel their parents have tried to run their lives too much (24 percent, up from 12 percent in 1966). Fifty years ago, the five most admired famous people were John F. Kennedy, Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Lyndon B. Johnson and Helen Keller, in that order. Today, pop culture rules, as President Barack Obama, Taylor Swift and Beyoncé top the list, with Selena Gomez tying Lincoln for fourth place. More than half support gun control (55 percent), the death penalty (52 percent), abortion rights (50 percent) and gay marriage (62 percent). (On gay marriage, Allison Moseley, 16, of Cudahy, Wisconsin, says, “Love is love.”) The most compelling findings show that race is the crucial issue for teens today. In 1966, 44 percent of American teens thought racial discrimination would be a problem for their generation. Now nearly twice as many—82 percent—feel the same way. The outlook is more alarming among black teens: Ninety-one percent think discrimination is here to stay, up from 33 percent in 1966. Recent headlines—police-involved shootings of unarmed black men, the Black Lives Matter movement, Donald Trump’s xenophobic politics—reveal a country deeply divided on race, with seemingly little hope for reconciliation. For many black Americans, the entire casino is stacked against them: They’re disproportionately affected by unemployment, poverty and a lack of educational opportunities. The U.S. has the highest incarceration rate in the world, and while blacks and Latinos make up 30 percent of the population, they account for 58 percent of the prison population. In 2013, the wealth gap
36
0 5 / 2 7/ 2 0 1 6
TEENS ON RACIAL DISCRIMINATION 1966
2015
33
91
In 1966, 33% of black teens thought racial discrimination would be a problem for their generation.
As of 2015, 91% of black teens think racial discrimination will be a problem for their generation.
PERCENT
PERCENT
+ BLINDED: Rahman, left, says a friend assumed her
44 82
SHAM IN DER DU L AI FOR NEWSWEEK (2); PREVIOUS SPRE AD: RIC KY CARIOTI/ THE WASHINGTON POST/GET T Y
family was in ISIS because they are from Bangladesh; Eboigbe has been mocked for her hair and her accent.
PERCENT
between whites and blacks reached its highest point since 1989, according to the Pew Research Center: The wealth of white households was 13 times that of black households, and 10 times that of Hispanic households. Newsweek found that black teens today are more likely than white or Hispanic teens to be aware of gun violence and of police accused of killing innocent people. They’re also more likely to worry that they’ll be the victims of shootings—at school, by police or in places of worship. And many teens, regardless of race or ethnicity, perceive that black Americans are discriminated against, including the way they’re treated by police (62 percent) and their ability to access decent jobs (39 percent). And what’s happened to Brewer’s seemingly indomitable optimism over the past 50 years, his unwavering faith in education? “I wouldn’t want to be growin’ up now,” he says. “It was simpler back then. The choices you had were limited, but they were good and positive. You had to work for what you wanted, and if you were black, you had to work doubly hard…. To wake up every day knowing for the rest of your life you’re gonna be broke, what’s a person to do? You’re not vested in America. We were vested.” The supportive environment Brewer came of age in was marked by family, community and the belief that hard work would pay off. For many today, those pillars have been toppled. “Back in the ’60s, we had black poverty, but we also had black jobs,” says Kirkland Vaughans, NEWSWEEK
In 1966, 44% of teens thought racial discrimination would be a problem for their generation.
PERCENT
As of 2015, 82% of teens think racial discrimination will be a problem for their generation.
TEENS’ PERSPECTIVES ON SEX IN 2015
20
86
20% of teens ages 16-17 say they’ve had sex.
86% of teens think teen girls are judged worse for having sex than teen guys.
PERCENT
37
0 5 / 2 7/ 2 0 1 6
PERCENT
TEENS’ PERSPECTIVES ON MARRIAGE IN 2015
a psychologist who teaches at Adelphi University and co-authored The Psychology of Black Boys and Adolescents with Warren Spielberg. “You can be poor, but as long as you have someplace to go, you have hope. Joblessness has grown, and the criminal-industrial complex has grown.” At the same time, the U.S. population is on track to be a minority majority by 2060: Minorities will make up 56 percent of the country, and in just four years, more than half of all children in the U.S. will be part of a minority group. What does the future look like for a country that’s still wracked by racism, where four of five teens believe discrimination will be a fixture in their lives?
57
47
About three in five teens (57%) agree that people should be married before having sex.
A little less than half of teens (47%) agree that the term marriage should apply only when it’s between a man and a woman.
PERCENT
1966: THE ILLUSION OF CAREFREE
NEWSWEEK’S “The Teen-Agers” issue in 1966 hit news-
stands with a young blonde on its cover—a California girl in white Wranglers and a yellow sweater, sitting on the back of a motorcycle, clutching a guy and flashing a spectacular smile. The scene encapsulated the stereotypical 1960s teenage experience: fast-paced, forward-thinking, titillating, seemingly carefree. That original survey found teens were generally happy, liked school and felt extraordinary pressure to attend college. They owned records, transistor radios and encyclopedias (today, smartphones, laptops and tablets dominate). It isn’t until the article’s fifth page—after sections labeled “They’re Spoiled,” “The Place of Sex” and “Freedom on Wheels”—that it admits, “There are also the Negroes,” before delving into a section called “Hopeful Outsiders.” We learned about the aspirations of black teens: Forty-one percent were “certain” they’d go to college; their mood: 22 percent said they were less happy than at 8 or 9, compared with 8 percent of the survey sample; their family dynamics: 38 percent said parents exerted “a lot of pressure” on them, compared with 18 percent of the entire group. And we heard about their fears: 31 percent thought life would be worse when they reached 21, compared with 25 percent of all teens. We also met a 16-year-old black teen from Los Angeles’s Watts (“Yeah, I was in [the riot]. I didn’t do none of the burnin’, but I was lootin’.”) who attended an almost entirely black high school, wasn’t sure he could get into college and felt “scared” of the future. Yet his optimism prevailed: “He still believes white employers will treat him fairly if he is ‘qualified.’ He is not bitter. ‘I’m not gonna drop out. If I can’t get into college, I’ll probably go out and get a job.” One of the most positive notes on race came from Brewer, who even had some sly thoughts on desegregation. “Most of the reason for prejudice is because we know very little about each other,” he told Newsweek in 1966. “Our neighborhoods are different, and so we have little contact. Every time some of us move into an area, they move out. Eventually we have to communicate because they are running out of places to move to.” “The Teen-Agers” presented a generation optimistic about the future (even as its members sometimes
TEENS AND GOD 1966
2015
96
83
Believe in God
Believe in God or other divine being
PERCENT
PERCENT
MY SPIRITUAL BELIEFS ARE A POSITIVE GUIDING FORCE TO ME *( EQUALS 100%)
12% 17% 38% 33% Strongly Disagree
Somewhat Agree
Somewhat Disagree
Strongly Agree
NEWSWEEK
38
0 5 / 2 7/ 2 0 1 6
AP
PERCENT
+ SIGN OF THE TIMES: In the midst of the civil rights move-
ment and school desegregation, most teens in the ’60s were optimistic about their future, and race relations.
feared it). And that’s not so surprising, since the civil rights movement was celebrating some major triumphs then. Segregation in public schools had been declared unconstitutional in 1954 with the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education. By the early 1960s, black Americans were staging sit-ins and freedom rides in the South, challenging whites-only lunch counters and segregated transportation. In 1963, more than 200,000 Americans attended the March on Washington, which concluded with the Reverend Martin Luther King’s transcendent “I Have a Dream” speech. (He did not, however, make the list of 13 famous people teens admired most in ’66.) The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed into law by President Johnson, banning discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex or national origin. School integration lurched forward, yet segregation persisted. In 1965, Alabama state troopers and local police assaulted civil rights demonstrators as they marched from Selma to Montgomery. Officers charged into the crowd, some on horseback, wielding nightsticks and firing tear gas, leaving more than 50 people injured on what became known as Bloody Sunday. Soon after, Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which prohibited discriminatory voting laws. “There was a sense of hopefulness—not just with African-Americans but with all people—that the country was generally on the right track,” says Arun Venugopal, host of Micropolis, WNYC’s semi-regular show on race and identity. “Economically, the country was doing really well. A lot of jobs were being created. If you were NEWSWEEK
young, there was a sense that you had a good chance of being gainfully employed. Minimum wage took you a lot further then than it does today.” As a teen, Brewer had a clear vision of his future: a career, not just a job; a family, but not until he could support one. He earned a scholarship to Williams College, got his law degree at Northwestern and, a couple of years later, joined the FBI. “At the time, there were 118 black agents out of almost 9,000. Me and another guy were one of the few from the North, both from public housing, and that was unheard of in the bureau,” he says. He got married at 30 (then married two more times; he has two daughters, 32 and 26, and a 3-year-old son). He’s a judge of the Cook County Circuit Court in Chicago, where he estimates that of the 480 people he has sentenced, only 5 percent graduated from high school, and 99 percent of the men were unemployed or underemployed. Brewer credits his success to his parents, his community and something impossible to replicate: the ’60s. “There was a big buzz about the possibilities for blacks at the time. We knew changes were coming: Opportunities that weren’t available before would be. The FBI would be available. We didn’t know how or when, but it was like, Be prepared! Education was a key,” he says. “It was almost like a big candy factory was gonna open up for us. Today, the factory is open, but there’s not much candy.”
39
0 5 / 2 7/ 2 0 1 6
NEWSWEEK
SHOW OF HANDS: The flurry of police shootings involv-
ing unarmed black men has spurred teens to be more engaged in racial issues and join groups like Black Lives Matter and the NAACP. +
40
0 5 / 2 7/ 2 0 1 6
BRANDEN E AST WOOD/REDUX
country’s first black president is finishing his second term, Trump is the presumptive Republican nominee in the upcoming presidential election, energizing a base The Atlantic describes as middle-aged white men without college degrees who don’t think they have a voice and fear outsiders. In September, Governor Paul R. LePage (R-Maine) blamed local drug use on “guys with the name D-Money, Smoothie, Shifty” who bring heroin to Maine and “impregnate a young white girl before they leave.” Discrimination has roiled pop culture too. When not a single person of color was nominated for best actor, best actress, best supporting actor or best supporting actress at the 2016 Academy Awards, prominent black celebrities boycotted the show, and host Chris Rock said in his opening, “You’re damn right Hollywood’s racist.” At this year’s Super Bowl halftime show, Beyoncé turned her performance of a new song into a political statement on police brutality and racism. Conservatives were outraged: She and her backup dancers were dressed like the Black Panthers! “You’re talking to middle America when you have the Super Bowl,” former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani said. “Let’s have, you know, decent, wholesome entertainment and not use it as a platform to attack the people who, you know, put their lives at risk to save us.” “Teenagers are growing up under this black president,
2016: CIVIL RIGHTS AND WRONGS growing up in America have access to life-changing opportunities—like earning a college scholarship or watching a brother marry his boyfriend— and minor privileges, like Googling the answer to any question in recorded human history on a smartphone and streaming Game of Thrones during a math quiz. They can also watch video of 12-year-old Tamir Rice playing with a pellet gun outside a recreation center— then getting shot dead a moment later by a police officer. They can hear Eric Garner gasp “I can’t breathe” as he’s placed in an apparent chokehold during an arrest, and they know that he’ll be dead in less than an hour. And they can witness massive protests erupt in Ferguson, Missouri, after the death of 18-year-old Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager shot at least six times, including twice in the head, by former police officer Darren Wilson, who’s white. A Guardian study found that, last year, young black men were nine times more likely than other Americans to be killed by police. The Washington Post reported that unarmed black men were seven times more likely than whites to die from police shootings last year. According to a ProPublica analysis, between 2010 and 2012, black teens were 21 times more likely to be shot dead than white teens. Racism has long been an American battleground, but it is seeping into everyday life in new ways. While the MOST CHILDREN
TEEN GADGET OWNERSHIP, 1966 VS. 2015
yet at the end of his presidency we are seeing a constant stream of police killings,” says Nikole Hannah-Jones, who covers civil rights and racial injustice for The New York Times. “I don’t know our kids are getting the tools to deal with that. Research shows millennials are no better at race than our generation because these kids still are not being educated together. Even when they are in the same school buildings they are not educated together. White and Asian kids are tracked into higher-level classes, and black and Latino kids are tracked lower.… Someone has to give up something so someone else can get equality.” But that’s not happening. “A black male with a college degree looking for a job will not do as well as a white male with a high school diploma looking for a job,” says Vaughans. “A black male without a criminal record will not do as well as a white male with a criminal record if they get to an interview. If you are a black male with a name like Jujuan, or if you are a black male and went to Howard, hang it up.” Brewer’s success was exceptional—a product of his staunch optimism and determination but also his community. Despite the tangle of violence and adversity in public housing in the 1960s, “there were mothers and fathers— whole families,” he says. He grew up eating dinner every night with his parents and five siblings. No TV. No fast food. Just home-cooked meals, family and conversation. “I didn’t know anyone who was chronically unemployed. And most fathers, if the son became 17 or 18, they could take them to their job and put ’em on. ‘You’re hired.’ They raised families on the money they made. But all those jobs changed,” he adds. “Now you have families disintegrated…. We all looked at public housing as being upwardbound, not as a decline. It’s a different world today.” Osariemen, 15, from Brooklyn, New York: “The most challenging thing in my life is hearing bigots in my school voice their opinion like no one will be offended, like they shouldn’t be held accountable....” Andrew, 17, from Ridgewood, New Jersey: “Blacks and whites are too confrontational about everything. I regard myself as being liberal and progressive, but there’s no need for confrontation. Black people now, so many of them, they’ve got this idea that everybody is attacking them. We’ve gotta love each other. It’s not ‘them’ against ‘us.’ It’s all ‘us.’ Black Lives Matter. Well, all lives matter.” Jorge, 13, from Las Vegas: “Race is a problem in my life. In my school, I hear a lot of racist words. The black teenagers say the N-word. They call Mexicans and Asians in a negative way. It feels bad.” Shylee, 16, Tampa, Florida: “Black people try to separate themselves. They even have their own TV network. If you’re trying to all be equal, why are you separating yourself from everyone? I’m not racist. I think there’s definitely bad white people who don’t like black people, but there’s also bad black people who don’t like white people.” Sophie, 16, Greensboro, North Carolina: “My dad makes an extraordinary amount of money, and we live in a very nice part of town.… I try to think about my privilege as NEWSWEEK
Boys
1966
Girls 75%
Records
75% 72%
Transistor Radio 50%
Record Player
Weights Guitar Motorbike Perfume Patterned Stockings Hair Dryer High Boots
72%
64% 60%
Encyclopedia Car
18% 8% 34%
0%
27% 0% 0% 0%
20% 96%
0%
67%
0%
65%
0%
56%
2015 73% 78%
Smartphone Laptop Computer
55% 62%
Bike
61% 49%
Tablet
48% 51% 34%
Journal or Notebook
41
0 5 / 2 7/ 2 0 1 6
90%
Musical Instruments
29% 36%
Desktop Computer
35% 29%
Car
11% 12%
Non-Smartphone
12% 10%
Motorcycle
2% 1%
None of These
2% 2%
58%
more diverse environment. “I thought people wouldn’t judge me based on how I looked. But people made fun of my hair and accent. If people are constantly throwing racist comments at you, especially at a young age, there’s no way to stand tall and be proud of who you are.” Rahman nods. “During the Paris attack, a friend said, ‘Can you tell your family not to kill my family?’” She looks up with big, quizzical eyes. “Why would you just assume my family is a part of ISIS?” “I was always hoping that once I got to college it would stop, and I’d find people like me. But now I’m transitioning into a world that might be the same,” says Eboigbe, who’s going to Brown this fall. “To see racism happening on college campuses, people being victimized, it’s scary.” It’s a grim outlook: Nearly twice as many teens—and nearly three times as many black teens—think racial discrimination is here to stay, compared with 50 years ago. The internet has given them a front-row seat to some of the most important civil rights moments of their young lives. They’ve witnessed injustice (Ferguson), outright racism against their president (61 percent of Trump supporters don’t believe Obama was born in the U.S.) and too little change coming too late (the Oscars). “Young people who otherwise couldn’t participate in robust conversations like this all of a sudden now can participate as fully as anyone else,” says DeRay Mckesson, the Black Lives Matter activist running for mayor of Baltimore. “That is a powerful thing. We can’t fix what we don’t address.” Racism may not look as it did 50 years ago—“It’s not formally entrenched,” Venugopal says—but it’s endemic, and changing one person’s mind is difficult enough, much less overhauling society. Hannah-Jones lets out a long sigh when asked what advice she’d give teens. “Oh man! That’s hard. Be better than your parents. Every generation, we think that as the old generation dies out, things
much as I can, because I know a lot of people don’t have the race and class privilege that I do. It’s definitely not something I deserve or another person doesn’t deserve.” Rissa, 16, Indianapolis: “Everybody has to realize that skin color is nothing more than someone having more pigment than someone else. Until people realize that, we’ll still have those people who are extremely racist.… We’re programmed to find flaws in others and extort them.” THE GREAT TRANSFORMATION racism is the issue of their generation, and many are working hard to understand it, confront it, change it. For some, this is a quiet, personal battle. “One time, I was sitting in my room wearing a T-shirt, and my grandma came in and she thought the reason my skin is the way it is is because I don’t take enough showers. Or I’m dirty. She thought if I cleanse myself harder, I’ll have lighter skin,” says Leuna Rahman, 17, of Queens, New York, who identifies as South Asian (her parents are from Bangladesh). “That’s not how it is. I was born this way. But I don’t let it get to me, because I learned to love myself.” She’s sitting in the basement of a brick church that moonlights as the headquarters for South Asian Youth Action, a youth organization for 2,000 elementary, middle and high school students in New York City, focusing on academics, college prep and leadership skills. “I did not want to be black,” says her friend, Loretta Eboigbe, 18. “There’s this notion that if you’re light-skin, it’s the right skin, or you’re prettier.… At one point I went to the bathroom and tried to get rid of my skin color because I wanted to be white. I was around 7 or 8. I took a sponge and tried to scrub off my skin.” Eboigbe was born in Italy and moved to the U.S. in 2008 because her parents, both Nigerian, wanted to live in a TEENS KNOW
TEENS’ PERCEPTIONS OF THEIR PARENTS RUNNING THEIR LIFE 1966
2%
86%
12%
2016
16%
Not Sure
60%
Haven’t Run Life Too Much/No
Have Run Life Too Much/Yes
24%
+
ANDREW BURTON/G ET T Y
RISE UP: Social media and the internet have given today’s youth a front-row seat to the current civil rights battles and put them on the front lines.
Teens today admire Selena Gomez, but they idolize Beyoncé, in part because she injected police brutality and civil rights into one of the largest, most American cultural events of the year. NAACP President Cornell Williams Brooks points out that in the past two years we’ve all witnessed more racial conflict and challenges “than we’ve seen in nearly a generation,” and he has had 28 percent more young people join the NAACP online. “At a moment of conflict, crisis and challenge, rather than sliding into a civic and depressive funk, what do teens do? They join organizations. They do something about it,” he says. Asked about the acute awareness teens today have about racism, Brewer sees cause for hope. “Race was and always will be a constant black teens have to address, and to overcome that, you need to be equipped. The primary thing you need is education. We’ve got a black president now. Back then, we didn’t have black mayors! But we had hope and belief, and we knew that all we needed was opportunity. Now you have more opportunity, but the preparation for it is gone. It’s hard to confront racism if you don’t have education…. There’s so much freedom today. What do you do with it?” President Obama, who knows something about rising above racism and raising teenagers, said in his commencement address at Howard University earlier this month, “If you had to choose a time to be, in the words of Lorraine Hansberry, ‘young, gifted and black,’ in America, you would choose right now.”
will be better. But the new generation becomes the old generation, so if teens really want to see a day where there is real equality, they’re gonna have to do a lot better job than we’ve done, our parents have done and our grandparents did. It’s not inevitable but pretty damn close to inevitable that this generation will repeat our mistakes.” But what’s the point of being a teenager if you can’t make mistakes, and you can’t change? Moseley, the 16-year-old from Wisconsin, is candid about her transformation on racism. “You have to be in a certain environment to change and learn that things are wrong.” She says a popular blogging platform changed her. “I was very racist and discriminatory, and after I went on Tumblr, I saw how people were struggling and how the things I was doing were wrong. Before, I wouldn’t want to be around anyone of color. I’d be like, Oh my gosh, they’re gonna mug me.… Now I’m just like, He’s a person. I’ve learned that you cannot judge a person. You cannot stereotype. It’s incredibly wrong to do.” In 1966, the 15-year-old Tommy Brewer wasn’t particularly concerned with racism. “Most young people don’t feel racial prejudice,” he told Newsweek then. “We don’t see the importance of civil rights yet. We believe in what Martin Luther King does, but we don’t idolize him the way we do a baseball player.” NEWSWEEK
43
0 5 / 2 7/ 2 0 1 6
S R E
E
G
TH
T
E
E
N
A
THEN& NOW
THEY WERE THE FACES AND VOICES OF A GENERATION...AND ARE AGAIN, AS THEY LOOK BACK 50 YEARS LATER AT THEIR LIVES, THEIR TRIUMPHS AND THEIR FEARS.
JAN SMITHERS
She attended Taft High School, and one day a guy she knew asked her to go surfing with him. “I thought, No, I couldn’t! I can’t play hooky!” But he talked her into it. The beach was empty, and Smithers remembers sitting on the sand watching him surf, wondering what her mother would say when she got home. Suddenly, she spotted two men dressed in black walking toward her. “They looked like little pencils walking down the beach. One had long hair and cameras around his neck. They walked right up to me and said, ‘We’re doing an article on teens across the country, and we’re looking for a girl from California. We’re wondering if you’d be interested in doing the article.’” Smithers said yes. After the article came out, her mother took her to meet agents in Hollywood. “I remember driving in the car with her. My mom was looking for a real person to represent me.” Smithers did commercials while finishing her last two years of high school. She was accepted to Chouinard Art Institute, now the California Institute of the Arts, but quit after a couple of years to pursue acting full time. It paid off. In her early 20s, she landed a role in the 1974 film Where the Lilies Bloom, about a family of children living in the Appalachian Mountains. Four years later, she got her big break on the Friday night sitcom WKRP in Cincinnati. She calls her success “destiny” but also sees it as dumb luck: “Honest to God, I don’t know how it happened!” Smithers met her former husband, Brolin, on the set of Hotel, an ’80s prime-time drama from Aaron Spelling. “I had been in WKRP, a situation comedy, which is a fast-paced dialogue between people,”
IT TOOK THE ASSISTANCE of half a dozen people and months of dead ends to track down Jan Smithers, by far the most famous of the six teenagers Newsweek profiled in 1966. After appearing on the cover of Newsweek’s teen issue—blond, sun-kissed, seated on a motorcycle and flashing a killer smile—Smithers received calls from “many, many” Hollywood agents hoping to represent her. Today, she’s most known for playing Bailey Quarters on WKRP in Cincinnati, which aired from 1978 to 1982. She was also married to actor James Brolin for nine years. Today, however, she lives in Southern California and avoids the spotlight. (Her most recent IMDb entry, for Mr. Nice Guy, is from 1987.) “People don’t even know I’m an actor! If I ever let them know, they’re so surprised,” she says. “I’m very private about my personal life.” Asked if her life unfolded how she imagined it would, she bursts out laughing. “No! Because of Newsweek magazine, I didn’t have a chance to imagine how it would come out!” Before Newsweek came into her life, Smithers was just a 16-year-old Valley girl. She grew up in a modest middle-class family in Los Angeles. Her father was a lawyer, her mother a homemaker, and she had three sisters, though the eldest died in a car accident at 21. Smithers was shy, liked art and was lukewarm on school. “Sometimes, when I’m sitting in my room, I just feel like screaming and pounding my pillow,” she told Newsweek. “I’m so confused about this whole world and everything that’s happening.” NEWSWEEK
44
0 5 / 2 7/ 2 0 1 6
+ LEADING LADY:
CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: JULIAN WASSER FOR NEWSWEEK; SONY PICTURES TELEVISION/SHOUT! FACTORY; ELISSA SYLVIA MIRZAEI FOR NEWSWEEK
Her picture on the cover of Newsweek led to a storybook success, but Smithers says she only found true happiness after giving her life to her child, her causes and her swami.
Smithers says. “When I did Hotel, we were about to do our scene, and James asked me if I was scared. I was sure of my lines, and I said no, I wasn’t. I realized that he might be scared! And I realized he was a very sincere person. I don’t know if he remembers that or not, but our relationship developed on sincerity.” They married in 1986 and have one daughter, Molly, who’s 28. When Smithers first learned she was pregnant, she planned to take six months off before returning to work. “I loved having a career, but when I met Molly, I just looked at her and told her, ‘You need me.’ And she looked at me so innocently. I thought, I have to stay! She changed my life. I really longed to be her mom.” NEWSWEEK
After nine years of marriage, Smithers and Brolin divorced. “It was good—really good—but somehow, somewhere, we started to wander,” she says. “He traveled a lot for work. We grew apart. He was gone months at a time.” Smithers also yearned for a life outside Hollywood. “I had Molly and wanted to be in the country and get away from that world. I just wanted a different life, and we ended up getting divorced.” When Molly reached high school, Smithers traveled to India with a charitable group. She was astonished at the hardships she witnessed there and moved by the people she met. For the first time, it dawned on her: “I could make a difference.” She spent the next 16 years going to India. “I learned to
45
0 5 / 2 7/ 2 0 1 6
meditate there, and I changed a great deal. I got out of myself.” These days, Smithers’s life largely revolves around meditation, healing, spirituality and the environment. She talks about yoga guru Swami Muktananda, Indian spiritual guru Mata Amritanandamayi (known as Amma the Hugging Saint) and Indian environmentalist Vandana Shiva as if they’re
her family. And she believes that helping people— neighbors and enemies—can heal anyone and any situation, from fights among friends to wars between nations. As she puts it, “The answer to peace in the universe is love.” Asked what advice she’d give young
F ROM L EFT: C HARLIE WIT TMAC K FOR NEWSWEE K; C HARLES HARBUT T FOR NEWSWEEK
THE GOOD EARTH: Nobody kept Curtis down on the farm; he returned there happily after working in big cities like Chicago and New York City. +
NEWSWEEK
46
0 5 / 2 7/ 2 0 1 6
people, she exclaims, “Read Autobiography of a Yogi! Get a hug from Amma! Make use of your time here! In my life, I found these things because I looked for them. I’m always in a place to receive the next thing. This is the real march, the quiet people’s change.” Over the years, Smithers has used her fame to support causes she cares about. “I stood for no nukes. I spoke for solar energy. I was invited to Washington and spoke in a subcommittee. I did a terrible job—it was way over my head—but I did it,” she says. “My spiritual teachers always say, Stay out of politics. But do you know what the byproduct of nuclear energy is?” she asks, then launches into a 10-minute spiel on plutonium. “I am so anti–nuclear energy.” Smithers is surprised to learn that 82 percent of teens today believe racial discrimination will be a problem for their generation. “People are people; we’re all the same,” she says. The key to solving discrimination and violence, she thinks, is “peace in your inner world. There’s such a commotion about the world, but we can find peace at any given moment. Conflicts are not etched in stone.” Yet she worries about how the economy will affect young people. “If this whole generation can’t buy a home because they have to pay off their college education, what have we done?” Recently, I called Smithers to ask her a few follow-up questions. We spoke for nearly an hour, and later that day, she called back and left a message. “I just thought of that whole conversation we had about discrimination,” she says with her soft voice on the recording. “I don’t really know the answer, but God does. You could write that down.”
12 rabbits, eight cats and one dog. After school, he plowed, hauled hay, fed the animals and put them to bed. His father was the plant process engineer for Maytag, and his mother died of ovarian cancer when Curtis was 10. “My father was very important in my life. He wanted me to be exposed to as many things as possible,” he says, speaking with a slight twang. “I had a sense of wanting to learn about things beyond just the scope of being a farm boy.” Curtis’s father had gone to Iowa State University, where he worked with professor John Vincent Atanasoff and graduate student Clifford Berry, who created the first electronic digital computer. He was also involved in the Manhattan Project at Iowa State, which developed and built the first atomic bomb. “He did a lot of things under the radar. It was very fortunate for me to see that.” In 1966, Newsweek called Curtis’s childhood “the vanishing rustic life—hunting, fishing, camping out and raising his own livestock,” and he remembers his youth fondly, without regrets. He was involved in the Newton Rotary Club, played the trumpet in the school orchestra, joined the debate team and chorus, and became class president his senior year. He met his wife, Beverly, in high school; she worked at the local ice cream shop, the Kone Korner, which Curtis’s uncle owned. “It will be 43 years this August,” he says of their marriage. “That doesn’t happen very often, does it?” After high school, Curtis went to Iowa State, where he studied animal science and agriculture business. He’d wanted to become a veterinarian, but he says there were around 900 applicants the year he applied to Iowa State’s College of Veterinary Medicine, and only 89 were accepted. He was not one of them. Instead, he’s spent the past 42 years in the meatpacking industry, working for companies involved in slaughter and production all the way to the manufacturing and sales of fresh and processed meats. His wife and two sons followed Curtis in his many jobs to 11 cities, from Chicago and Cincinnati to Oklahoma City and New York. “I’m pleased with where my career has gone. It’s tied to an industry
BRUCE CURTIS WITH PINK CHEEKS and a tired, distant stare, 13-year-old Bruce Curtis stands in front of the barn on his father’s 116acre farm, a green Army cap pulled down to his brow. It’s daybreak, and he’s bundled up in blue coveralls and a teal sweatshirt, his hands covered by soiled yellow working gloves. “If you’re looking at my picture in coveralls, you’re thinking, That kid was never in New York!” Curtis, now 63, says of the photo Newsweek published in 1966. “But I used to live in Sparta, New Jersey, and ride the train to Penn Station and work in 11 Penn Plaza. I’ve come a long way from small-town Iowa.” Curtis grew up in Newton, Iowa, population 15,381 (today, it’s 15,150). Every morning, he woke at 6 o’clock to feed his family’s 30 cattle, 24 sheep, NEWSWEEK
47
0 5 / 2 7/ 2 0 1 6
don’t have that opportunity.” He’s also worried about drugs. When Curtis was in high school, he remembers some people drinking. “Today is scarier. You have scary things with meth and some of those things that really are ruining a lot of families and wrecking a lot of lives. It’s a state problem. We’re located along Interstate 35 and 80, and that drug traffic moves up [from the South],” he says. “Unfortunately, it is available. To be honest, I’m not sure I’d want to go through [being a teen] again.”
that’s part of my background. It’s a very demanding business environment, and I’ve been successful from plant level to corporate to ownership of a company,” he says. “I’ve experienced downsizing a couple times in that career, which gives you some humility and also gives you some strength.” In 1998, Curtis moved back to Newton, rebuilt the family farmhouse and now is a co-owner of Shelby Foods, which turns meat products into the raw materials for the meat, pet food and pharmaceutical industries across the U.S. and the world. In the 1960s, Newton was the manufacturing muscle for Maytag. The company’s headquarters, located in the tiny rural town, helped it flourish and employed thousands. All that changed in 2006, when the Whirlpool Corp. bought Maytag. The company closed a year later, taking with it many of the jobs that sustained the community. Upper management—and the kinds of families that came along with it—disappeared from Newton, Curtis recalls. “It’s a little more diverse [now],” he says. “It’s a little more of a labor type of environment here. The school is smaller by population, so that has changed sports and academics.” One positive addition has been the Des Moines Area Community College’s Newton campus. “It’s done a great job working with the school system to get high school students some of their further college credits. That is something we didn’t have years ago,” Curtis says. Still, he worries about teenagers and the world they’re inheriting. “I’m concerned about what college students will have for jobs. Terrorism for me is for sure a concern. We seem to have a world that’s intent on destroying itself, and for me that’s very unsettling,” he says. Teenagers’ greatest challenges, he thinks, will be self-confidence, employment and success. “You need to make things happen,” he says. “It’s not a given that there will be jobs for you. You have to go search it out.” Asked what advice he’d give young people today, he says, “That’s a good question. Boy...” Then he goes silent. After a long pause, he says, “I was fortunate with the environment I grew up in and the family background, and some teenagers probably NEWSWEEK
CHRISTOPHER REED CHRISTOPHER REED was never one for labels. “I’ve always disdained the word teenager,” he told Newsweek in 1966, when he was 17. He believed the word had “hostile connotations,” and he referred to teens as they rather than we. “People think anyone who’s a teenager is automatically a delinquent,” he said. “I don’t feel I’m a member of the vast portion of kids my age.” Growing up in a townhouse on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, Reed was a model of good behavior and an honors student at the elite Browning School near Park Avenue (graduates include John D. Rockefeller, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., Jamie Dimon and Howard Dean). He rarely smoked. He avoided bars. He did his homework, practiced piano two hours a day. In his free time, he played hockey on the roof of his school and wandered through museums and galleries, and hoped for a girlfriend. His parents were divorced; he had two younger brothers. Every Saturday, he spent five hours at a rundown community center on the Lower East Side teaching children to read. Even at that age, he was sophisticated enough to understand life beyond his privileged bubble: “Everyone is always talking about the big problems of today’s teenagers. But do they really have any? They have the same problems as older people—the world’s problems.” After high school, Reed attended Harvard. “I went from one privileged boys school in Manhattan to an elite institution. I guess I’ve been living it down ever since,” he says. When we imagine the futures of dutiful, privileged youngsters like Reed, we often think: lawyer, banker, hedge funder. But Reed wanted to make the world a better place. His professional life has revolved around local
48
0 5 / 2 7/ 2 0 1 6
DEVIN YAL KIN FOR NEWSWE EK( 2)
farming, the environment, activism and education. “I’ve always been open to the idea that the most interesting changes happen on a small scale—grassroots. Institutions can do something that isn’t top-down and that has real impact. So it’s not a surprise that I would have landed in a small community that would easily be overlooked yet has its own contribution to make to changing the world.” Reed, 67, lives in Philmont, New York, a village about two hours north of New York City. His longtime partner is an herbalist who founded High Falls Gardens, a small farm turned nonprofit dedicated to Chinese medicinal herbs. Reed is a community and environmental activist—he spent a lot of time protesting in Zuccotti Park during Occupy Wall Street, and in the early 2000s he helped wage a winning battle against a proposed cement plant in Philmont. Recently, he joined a local steering committee tasked with figuring out how to use the area’s post-industrial infrastructure and history of water power to enhance the community. Reed jokes that he started working in the local food world “before it was fashionable” and, for the last 15 years, he’s collaborated with small farms as a consultant and educator. He also worked as a woodworker and a contractor, and has taught piano for over 40 years. “Because I rejected certain paths of success, I sometimes wondered if I was a failure,” he says. “It’s taken me a long time to know that there was a positive. That the things I chose to do did have meaning.” Reed looked up to his parents for their social intelligence (his mother was an artist, and his father worked in insurance), and he admired his uncle, Henry Hope Reed, an esteemed historian and architecture critic, for his principles. “He said his elite education was worthless. Everything he learned, he learned on his own,” Reed says. “He had advice for me when I was a teenager that I still remember: ‘See things as they are.’ I think it takes courage to do that. Maybe it doesn’t take as much
+ OCCUPIED WALL STREET: A life of privilege growing
up in Manhattan didn’t keep Reed from social activism, which included joining the protests against the country’s financial powers in 2011.
NEWSWEEK
49
0 5 / 2 7/ 2 0 1 6
FROM LEF T: ERIC K AYNE FOR NEWSWEEK; SHEL HERSHORN FOR NEWSWEEK
courage if you’re already under the gun economically. It’s easier to see through the halo of illusions if you are suffering from tap water that’s polluted or have no way of surviving if you have a major illness because it’s too expensive.” Reed doesn’t have children, but he’s taught many young people over the years, and their fearlessness is what impresses him most, especially in the face of a future marked by student debt, fewer well-paying entry-level jobs, public health crises and wealth inequality. Asked what advice he’d give teens today, he says he’d tell them that “even the ugly truth is an important thing to pursue. Behind the ugly truth there are also beautiful truths about the resilience of people.” When reminded of his early aversion to the word teenager, he bursts out laughing. “I remember saying that, and I remember the flack I would get about that too. Seeing people in aggregates and typing them is a very bad idea,” he says. “I instinctively bristle now at these broad-stroke judgments, whether at Muslims or another embattled group. There’s something going on to render those groups defenseless or vulnerable. Then they’re condemned on top of that. That seems grossly unfair.… “Life over a half-century is humbling. I hope that I’m cultivating more ability to empathize with different kinds of people. I’m still struggling to be more human. That’s a lifelong challenge.”
LAURA JO DEGAN (Formerly Davis) +
“I HAVE BEEN VERY NERVOUS about this,” Laura Jo Degan, 64, says at the outset of our phone interview. “I have to tell you the truth: I wasn’t sure what ya’ll wanted. I’m nothing.… I’m not.… My life is pretty ho-hum.” Fifty years ago, when Degan (who at the time went by her maiden name, Laura Jo Davis), spoke NEWSWEEK
DEEP ROOTS: Behind the radiant smile Degan
flashed in the original teen issue were some extraordinary tragedies in her young life, including a deadly bombing in her elementary school.
50
0 5 / 2 7/ 2 0 1 6
to Newsweek, she was a content 14-year-old. Growing up in Houston, she played volleyball, cheered, water-skied and rode horses. Once a week, she volunteered as a candy striper at a local hospital. Degan loved riding Honda motorbikes and worked hard in school (she cried when she didn’t get an A or a B). Smoking, to her, was “repulsive,” politics uninteresting and the Bomb not worth worrying about: “It’s a stupid thought. I guess I feel it will never happen to me.” She firmly believed her future would “fall into place.” Her greatest concern in life? Boys. Degan’s seemingly unshakeable optimism—not to mention the cheerful photos Newsweek published of her gleefully riding a Honda motorbike and smiling brightly in a close-up—masked the hardships she’d endured. The year before Newsweek’s cover story, Degan’s father, a photographer for Shell Oil, died of a heart attack on Mother’s Day. “There were real traumatic things—I guess you can tell from my voice,” she says, trembling. “Financially, that put a big strain on the family.” Degan started working at a local florist, and her mother got a job running an OB-GYN medical center. Degan’s brother and sister were older, so “it was just my mother and I, really, for a long time at the house.” And there was the bombing. On September 15, 1959, Paul Orgeron, an ex-convict and tile-setter, walked into Poe Elementary School with his 7-year-old son, Dusty, and a briefcase jammed with dynamite. He wanted to enroll Dusty, but the principal told him they needed the boy’s address and birth certificate. Orgeron vowed to return with the paperwork the next day. But instead of leaving, he took Dusty out to the playground and started blathering about God and power in front of about 50 students. Then he detonated the bomb hidden in his briefcase. Body parts flew everywhere. The blast killed six people: Orgeron, Dusty, the janitor, another teacher and two children. Seventeen more students were injured, including two who lost a leg, and the principal suffered a broken leg. Degan was 8 years old, in her third-grade classroom when the bomb exploded. At first she thought it was the Russians. Her teacher led everyone outside, but as an appointed school monitor, Degan had to run into the bathrooms and the teacher’s lounge and shout “get out!” While her classmates exited the building with their teacher, who instructed them to look away from the carnage, Degan left by herself. “I came out, and because I wasn’t told not to look, I looked,” she says, sniffling. “Everything was in black and white, except for [the principal’s] dress…. That NEWSWEEK
color of her dress was just so embedded in my brain. It was the most vivid purple.” Degan didn’t talk about the bombing for many years, and then it was only with her family and best friend. “I was shattered,” she says. “I couldn’t sleep without the light on or somebody in my room. For a long time. We all got past it. They didn’t send counselors into the schools in those days. You just sucked it up, and you went on to school.” When Degan graduated from high school, her mother “scraped up all the nickels and dollars we could find” and sent her on a trip to Europe. It was the summer of 1969. That fall, Degan started her freshman year at Louisiana State University. “I was convinced I could do anything with plants—cure diseases and stuff like that. I was going to be the mad scientist. That all went down the tubes because I realized you had to know a lot about chemistry.” She studied landscape architecture instead. Sophomore year, she was thrown from a horse and crushed her spine against a telephone pole. She didn’t think she would ever walk again or finish college, but she eventually did both, graduating from LSU seven years after she started. She was the first person in her family to earn a degree. Degan, who came from five generations of Texans, moved back to Houston and worked as a landscape architect for 15 years. She and her husband married in 1980, when she was 30, and they have two children. She now works for his contracting business, but over the past 20 years she’s spent most of her time taking care of three relatives with Alzheimer’s disease. “When people ask me why I haven’t been involved in my career—I’m a caregiver.” Degan’s life has hardly been “ho-hum,” but when she reflects back, her memories are tinged with a wistful hint of regret. “I guess I’m where I’m supposed to be. But with that in mind, I think I should have—how can I say?—I could have done more with my life. I think you always feel [that way] when you’re reaching the end of life,” she says. “I’m looking at retirement now, and that’s pretty scary with the economy. So I shoulda made a lot of money. That
51
0 5 / 2 7/ 2 0 1 6
shake my head and stay awake,” she said. Her views on the world haven’t budged in the past 50 years. “I’m as radical as I’ve ever been,” says Richardson, 67, who now lives in San Leandro, California. “I still think society is basically gonna collapse due to bad economics, because we’re spending money constantly that we don’t have. Like a pyramid scheme. I think it’s going to be that and the environment that’s gonna kill us,” she says. “[This country] is run by the rich. If you’re poor, you stay poor. It’s not a democracy. It never was.” When I ask Richardson what she did after high school, she replies, “I definitely took some time off. I didn’t start college—drugs were rampant in those days, and I certainly had mine.” She drove cross-country playing folk music and the blues with someone she says is Woody Guthrie’s nephew. They landed gigs in clubs—she sang and played guitar—and after a few years she returned to California and enrolled at California State University, San Bernardino. She couldn’t afford to graduate, so she dropped out after a couple of years. She spent her 20s and 30s in a haze of music gigs, parties and “average jobs” and has spent the past 10 years working as a vehicle registration clerk. She met her husband when she was 36, and they have no children. Richardson’s father was a dentist, her mother a housewife, but after her parents divorced, her mother got a job as a secretary. She eventually went back to school and earned a degree in anthropology. “She didn’t know it, but she had a rare cancer of the small intestine, and just as she was going for her first job, it killed her. I was 34. She was 54 when she died,” Richardson says. Her older brother died of heart disease at 54. “There’s nobody left. I’m it. My father lived until his 70s. His heart got him too, but he got to do everything he wanted to do.” Richardson talks with a hoarse, raspy voice that sounds as if it’s about to give out any moment. When she was 44, she was diagnosed with throat cancer. She beat it, and while she may not be able to sing anymore, she still plays the guitar, keyboard, dulcimer and ukulele. Clearing her throat, she says that she has regrets—“everybody does”—but she wouldn’t change a single opinion when it comes to her politics. “The gay marriage thing is great! We’ve done something right. I know marijuana will do some very interesting and positive things; it isn’t just about getting high,” she says. Yet she has harsh words for America’s “so-called election,” its health care system, overcrowded prisons and the legal sys-
shoulda been my goal, but I never had those goals. I think my biggest goal was I wanted to be happy. I saw people who did not have a lot of joy. So I just want to be happy.” “Teenagers all have these really bizarre expectations that they’re going to be Mark Zuckerberg,” she says. “And then, don’t even get me started on Hollywood…. I choose not to look at that sort of thing. I’m sorry. I want to live the life of Mrs. Cleaver. Why can’t it be like that?”
LAURA RICHARDSON (Formerly Hausman)
WHEN LAURA RICHARDSON moved from Boston to Berkeley, California, halfway through high school, she left behind her old friends and didn’t look back. “They were a bunch of perfect, first-class... finks,” she told Newsweek in 1966, when she was 17. At Berkeley High School, Richardson’s new friends were into discussing five topics: Vietnam, the Bomb, civil rights, marijuana and sex. “I really fit in here,” she said. Newsweek’s original profile of Richardson (who went by Laura Hausman at the time) showed her in a paisley kneelength skirt, an orange turtleneck and black cardigan, strumming a guitar in front of a peace sign with the words Peace and Freedom written around it. She was against the Bomb (“It’s so completely stupid...to just be able to push a button and destroy the world”), against the Vietnam War (“My solution is simply to get out”), for the legalization of marijuana (“It’s sort of like taking whiskey, only it doesn’t cause cirrhosis”) and “vociferously” for legalizing homosexuality. In high school, Richardson volunteered at a program for black children in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, participated in a “women-for-peace” march and joined the high school arm of the Vietnam Day Committee. “School is just a place where I go to NEWSWEEK
52
0 5 / 2 7/ 2 0 1 6
FROM LE FT: EUGENE ANTHONY FOR NEWSWEEK; JEFF ENLOW FOR NEWSWEEK
+ FREE RADICAL: Richardson embraced the counter-
culture in the ’60s (she even sang and toured with a band) and says she hasn’t softened her stance on social issues over the past 50 years,
her regrets: “Educate yourselves. Oh yes. In any way possible.” The greatest challenge facing teenagers today, she thinks, is the environment: “Everything else is kinda superfluous if you don’t have a planet that can be lived on. I don’t think teenagers will have it as good as we did…. It’s a pessimistic view, but, man, have they got their work cut out for them. If I was growing up today, I’d be damn angry about it.”
tem, which she says is “run by very rich and usually white guys.” As for racism, “I don’t see a cure…. I think economic equality would make things a lot better, but that isn’t happening in this country.” Her one piece of advice for young people reflects NEWSWEEK
53
0 5 / 2 7/ 2 0 1 6
TEENS TODAY/ DIVERSITY
GOOD SCIENCE
COLOR CODED
Computer engineering is mostly white and male. Changing that means reaching teen black girls a self-driving car,” NyEla, 10, says to a room of parents and girls ranging from elementary to high school. “It was pretty easy.” Just hours ago, NyEla had never programmed, and now she is showing off her creation, a game she created where a car, of its own accord, navigates a roughly rendered track. NyEla dove into computer programming with the help of an organization called Black Girls Code (BGC). When Amber Morse, BGC’s events coordinator, shouts to the crowd, “What do we do?” the girls shout back, “We change the face of technology!” Black Americans make up just 7 percent of the country’s technology engineers. Just 3 percent are black women. These race and gender gaps can’t be explained by lack of access; the days when you had to be wealthy to use a computer as a kid have vanished. According to Barbara Ericson, at Georgia Institute of Technology, the biggest challenge now is getting early opportunities to take computer science classes. Of all those who took the Advanced Placement test in computer science in 2015, 78 percent were male, and only 4 percent were black. “The students with prior experience in those fields are the ones who are going to succeed in college,” Ericson says. The mission of BGC, which started in 2011, is to get girls tinkering with programming while they’re young, making them feel like they can compete in computer science classes in college and beyond. It’s a goal shared by BGC’s Silicon
Valley sponsors such as Salesforce and Google, which are struggling with diversity, and by similar nonprofits around the country, like Girls Who Code and Level the Playing Field. BGC introduces young women of color to computer programming by hosting weekend coding sessions and pairing them with mentors. The girls learn to code with Scratch, a computer language developed at MIT that lets users manipulate visual tools to create algorithms, the logic systems behind programs. It’s simple enough that children can learn but powerful enough to be used in introductory computer science classes at some universities. The girls drag and drop colored puzzle pieces to create simple instructions like “if the ball hits a wall, stop.” Most of the BCG volunteers work in tech and are acutely aware of the industry’s massive diversity problem. “Tech is mostly white and Asian,” says Robert Hui, a programmer with Netflix who volunteered his day to teach the girls to code. “That’s been the demographic since college.” He says his intro-level undergraduate computer science classes was about 25 percent female, but that number dwindled as he moved into more advanced classes. But Hui also thinks change is coming. After one grueling day of working through computer bugs, a girl ran up to one volunteer and said, “I’m going to work at Google when I grow up and I’m going to ride a bike at lunch,” proving she’s already got the soul of a techie.
“TODAY, I MADE
NEWSWEEK
54
0 5 / 2 7/ 2 0 1 6
BY GRANT BURNINGHAM @granteb
T E TH E
E N
A G E R S + BETTER SCREEN TIME: Almost all
BL ACK GIRLS CO DE
kids today have computer access. The key is getting them to think about what goes on behind the screen.
NEWSWEEK
55
0 5 / 2 7/ 2 0 1 6
#NODARETOOSTUPID
WHAT WOULD HAPPEN if you took a can of aerosol hairspray or air freshener and sprayed it directly at a cigarette lighter’s flame? Any rational adult is likely to say, Nothing good. But if you’re a teen, you might think, Great snap! Since mid-March, social media outlets have been flooded with videos of young people creating
NEWSWEEK
blowtorch-size dragon-breath puffs of fire by putting flame into contact with flammable liquid (usually while indoors). It began when one teen Instagram user gave the stunt a try and tagged the video post #FireSprayChallenge. The online dare spread rapidly, and now there are over 4,000 posts on Instagram with the
56
0 5 / 2 7/ 2 0 1 6
BY JESSICA FIRGER @jessfirger
JIM YOU NG/REUTERS
The teenage brain is primed to take any social media challenge, no matter how half-baked or dangerous
+ SELFIE-OBSESSED:
From posing in dangerous places, like this railing over Lake Michigan, to setting themselves on fire and jumping into a pool, teens are going to extremes for internet adulation.
#FireSprayChallenge hashtag. The daring feat is an offshoot of the #FireChallenge, another popular and even more dangerous social media craze that involves dousing oneself with a flammable liquid like rubbing alcohol, then lighting your torso or limbs on fire before jumping into a shower or pool. That challenge has resulted in a seemingly endless stream of reports of teens with third- or fourth-degree burns. Last year, an 11-year-old boy in the U.K. underwent a skin graft after the challenge went terribly wrong. A 15-year-old in Buffalo, New York, died from injuries he suffered after taking the dare. Fire safety divisions in several states have issued emergency warnings about the challenge. Other popular and life-threatening social media challenges have prompted warnings from public health officials. The #CinnamonChallenge, which involves swallowing a tablespoon of the spice without any water, can lead to vomiting, choking and a trip to the ER. That dare became so popular that within the first three months of 2012, poison centers nationwide received 139 calls that involved cinnamon overdoses. A person who accepts the #EraserChallenge is required to take a pink eraser and rub it on his or her arm while saying a word for each letter of the alphabet. By the end, some have burns or deep cuts. The list of the many and varied challenges teens take on from social media reads like a disturbing report from a torture chamber: have a friend douse you with boiling water, eat a Carolina Reaper (the world’s hottest chili pepper), pour a bottle of vodka into your open eye, chew and swallow an entire cactus plant. Attempting to grasp the motives behind the reckless stupidity of teenagers has been a frustrating endeavor for parents since the beginning of time, and many experts believe the internet has made it even worse. In the good old days, parents typically felt they could maintain control over their misbehaving teen simply by limiting the time spent with peers who were a “bad influence.” But thanks to social media, persuasive people with dumb ideas are now omnipresent and a mere click, tap or swipe away. Add in the appeal of 30 seconds of fame, and some teens are willing to try just about anything. In many cases, the more dangerous it is, the better. Over the years, scientists have tried to better understand the biology behind risk-taking behavior in teens by studying young animals. Early experiments on rodents and nonhuman primates
TEENS TODAY/ONLINE
helped pinpoint critical neurochemical and cellular changes in the brain as it matures that may promote novelty- and sensation-seeking behaviors. Then, in the 1980s, magnetic resonance imaging became widely available. Because MRIs are safe to use (they don’t expose a person to radiation), researchers were able to use them to scan the brains of healthy kids repeatedly, over a long period of time. Though the resulting data didn’t confirm what parents often claim—that their teen has half a brain—it did show that critical neurological development does occur during teen years.
THE LIST OF THE MANY CHALLENGES TEENS TAKE ON FOR SOCIAL MEDIA READS LIKE A DISTURBING REPORT FROM A TORTURE CHAMBER.
NEWSWEEK
The brain is made up of two types of tissue: gray matter and white matter. White matter is composed mostly of nerve fibers responsible for transmitting the electric signals that ensure communication from one area of the brain to another. Gray matter is made mostly of neuronal cell bodies and dendrites—the thread-like segments of neurons that receive and send signals from other neurons—and is involved in thought processing and memory. By the age of 6, a person’s brain is approximately 95 percent of its eventual adult size, but brain scans have indicated that in the following years, gray matter continues to grow in volume, with the most growth occurring during early adolescence. As gray matter grows, so do the number of brain cells and connections between these cells, which shoot like rapid fire. This constant firing of synapses—the electric impulses that jump from neuron to neuron—is critical to learning and development. In the first few years of life, the brain acquires an abundance of these connections—more than it needs. Then, through
57
0 5 / 2 7/ 2 0 1 6
in order for the brain to commit something to memory, dopamine must be present, which essentially means it is needed for the brain to TEENS TODAY/ONLINE process important information such as don’t light yourself on fire or you might get burned. Because it’s flooded with dopamine, the teen brain is driven to seek out constant stimuli and reward, says Laurence Steinberg, a professor of psychology at Temple University. “Things that feel good feel even better when you’re a teenlearning, it begins to eliminate the weaker conager,” he says. So although a tablespoon of cinnanections, a process known as synaptic pruning. mon in a teen’s esophagus might be a miserable Puberty marks the start of “specialization,” says experience, the page views, likes and favorites Dr. Jay Giedd, chairman of child and adolescent that trigger a rush of dopamine after the teen psychiatry at the University of California, San posts the video mean the person may not care Diego. This is the point when the brain turns to about the physical pain. “This combination of weeding out its weakest remaining connections. an easily aroused reward center and still slow to At the same time, good and useful connections mature self-regulation system is what contributes are strengthened. This process continues well to a lot of this risky behavior,” Steinberg says. beyond the college years. Worse, social media use peaks just when Synaptic pruning is the reason young people sensation-seeking behavior starts. According to have a much easier time learning new things, such the American Academy of Child and Adolescent as languages and driving. The problem, though, Psychiatry, over 60 percent of 13- to 17-year-olds is that all of this is happening in the prefrontal have at least one social media network profile. cortex, the part of the brain sometimes referred In 2015, the Pew Research Center found that 92 to as the brain’s CEO because it is responsible for big decisions, impulse control and the ability to reason (like a rational adult). “The part of the brain that wants to think things through, think of the consequences and think long term is still under construction well until their 20s,” Giedd says. The teen brain is compelled to seek out new experiences that help the brain learn, but teens don’t yet have the tools to make rational choices. That’s why accidents, drug use, unprotected sex and other risky behaviors percent of teens go online daily and that 24 perare much more common in young people, some cent are on “almost constantly.” Teens reach experts say. According to the National Institutes “social maturity” by age 14 to 16, which is acaof Health, accidental deaths increase dramatidemic-speak for “this kid is on every single social cally during early and late adolescence. Death media network”—including ones grown-ups by injury occurs at rates six times higher among probably don’t even know about. teens 15 to 19 when compared with those 10 to 14. This greatly expands the opportunity for influMeanwhile, something else is also occurring ence—Steinberg’s research shows that when it around this time that makes young people more comes to sensation-seeking behavior, teens are likely to get into trouble: puberty. As the body equally swayed by unknown peers (such as Instagears up for the changes that come with sexual gram influencers) and IRL friends. In one study, maturity, it ramps up production of hormones— published in Developmental Science in 2014, Steinincluding dopamine, the “feel good” neurotransberg and a research team divided 64 teens into mitter that increases when the brain’s reward two groups. The researchers asked all 64 the same system is triggered. Whether the reward is food, questions regarding money rewards, such as, sex, money, drugs, retweets, followers or Insta“Would you rather have $500 today or $1,000 six gram likes, dopamine functions pretty much the months from now?” same way. The biological need to feel good compels a person to behave in a way that will provide Half of the participants also were tricked into stimulus and reward. Research has shown that thinking a peer of the same gender and similar
THANKS TO SOCIAL MEDIA, PERSUASIVE PEOPLE WITH DUMB IDEAS ARE NOW OMNIPRESENT AND A MERE CLICK, TAP OR SWIPE AWAY.
NEWSWEEK
58
0 5 / 2 7/ 2 0 1 6
YOUTUBE TEENS
media that will get lots of likes and comments. But Lenhart also argues that teenage bad behavior isn’t unique to the digital age. “In my high school, one of the Spirit Week challenges was called the Chubby Bunny challenge, where you were supposed to see how many marshmallows you could stick in your mouth,” she says. Everyone did it, even though it was clearly unwise. “And I went to high school before the internet, before social media was widely available.”
CLOCKWIS E FROM TOP LEFT: LEV I JOHNSON/ YOUTUBE; CEM EH KOCOROPOB/ YOUTUBE; THE LOYA L DUTCHM AN/ YOUTUBE; AS HY PINE APPLEZ / YOUTUBE ; MAT T 51 / YOUTUBE; MURANATU SESAY/ YOUTUBE
“The part of the brain that wants to think things through, think of the consequences and think long term is still under construction well until their 20s,” says Giedd. +
background was watching them on a closed-circuit computer system. Steinberg’s team found that people in the fake peer-observed group were consistently willing to accept 15 percent less money than those who were alone. “But we don’t see that pattern for adults,” Steinberg says. Amanda Lenhart, a 16-year veteran at Pew, has found one-upmanship is a central part of online behavior for teens. In a 2014 survey that Lenhart helped run, 40 percent of teens said they feel pressure to post content on social
NEWSWEEK
59
0 5 / 2 7/ 2 0 1 6
TEENS TODAY/ EDUCATION
HARVARD CAN WAIT
Malia Obama is putting college on hold and joining the growing number of Americans taking a gap year THERE WAS A surge of energy at the annual Gap Year Conference in Boston in May. Attendees, eager to hear the latest from the world of gap years—the time some young people take off between high school and college in order to travel or work—had learned that the movement would be getting a famous new participant: Malia Obama, the president’s eldest daughter. Malia will attend Harvard University, the White House recently announced—but she won’t be starting this fall as originally expected. Instead, the older first daughter will take a gap year, a practice that has been gaining momentum in the United States over the past decade. Gap year programs (though not always lasting a year and sometimes taken during or after college) were once more common abroad. Holly Bull, president of the Center for Interim Programs, which counsels students and mid- or post-career adults on choosing gap programs, says that when her father founded the center in 1980, “nobody was talking gap years in the U.S.” Now, she says, “there’s far more awareness and support for the idea.” It is Britain’s Prince William and Prince Harry, both of whom took time off after their studies in the early 2000s, who deserve credit for the growing interest in gap years, according to Bull. “That was when the term gap year started to really appear in the United States,” she says. Bull expects to see a similar spike following Malia’s news and
NEWSWEEK
says she has already heard from one student she counseled who “was right on the fence about it. And when she heard Malia was going to take a gap year, she said, ‘OK, I’m going to take one too.’” The American Gap Association, an accreditor of organizations that offer gap year programs, estimates that 30,000 to 40,000 students in the U.S. take such time off annually. Gap year enrollment grew about 23 percent between the 2013 and 2014 school years, the AGA says, and has increased every school year since 2006 or earlier. Attendance at U.S. gap year fairs has apparently spiked 294 percent since 2010. The uptick is likely related to an increasingly stressful college admissions process, education experts say. “You’re looking at a growing rate of student burnouts,” says Jane Sarouhan, an AGA board member and a vice president of the Center for Interim Programs. Overburdened high schoolers feel they need recovery time before hitting the books again, she says. Today’s young people are often talented in many ways, she adds, “but don’t have some basic soft skills,” such as “how to take care of themselves, how to make good choices, how to get themselves out of bed, accountability,” and they may seek time off to acquire them. In a 2014–2015 AGA survey of gap year alumni, 92 percent said they took time off for reasons related to personal growth, 85 percent said they had wanted to travel and experience other cultures, and 81 percent said they had done so in
60
0 5 / 2 7/ 2 0 1 6
BY MAX KUTNER @maxkutner
it, because just about everybody realizes that it ends up resulting in more mature, more focused student bodies,” says Bob Clagett, director of college counseling at St. Stephen’s Episcopal School in Austin, Texas, and the former dean of admissions at Middlebury College in Vermont, who has studied the gap year trend. Despite the momentum, many families worry about how expensive some of these programs may be. “There’s a very common misperception,” Clagett says, “that the gap year phenomenon is primarily the domain of the wealthy, or at least the affluent, and I think it’s really important for people to understand that anyone can do a gap year.” He worries that Malia’s decision will deepen that misperception. Some students choose to work during such a year, he adds. Still, the most expensive programs could run as high as $40,000, says Sarouhan. Clagett notes that deferring a year might also result in having to pay a higher tuition fee as rates increase. Malia will join Harvard’s class of 2021 after she graduates this spring from Sidwell Friends School in Washington, D.C. Harvard says that typically 80 to 110 of its incoming students defer each year, up from the 50 to 70 reported in 2009. This spring, Harvard admitted 2,037 students. For the child of a U.S. president, delaying until her dad leaves office has added bonuses. Starting Harvard next fall means Malia will not be the
+ FALL INTO THE GAP: By taking a
gap year, Malia will not have to be the child of a sitting president on campus, which might mean fewer secret service agents hanging around the dorm.
order to take a break from academics. (The figures add to more than 100 percent because many students cited multiple reasons.) Inevitably, the uptick in interest in gap years has been followed closely by an industry eager to capitalize on it: Thousands of programs offer experiences involving subjects like environmental conservation, wilderness education and cultural immersion; fairs promote programs, and consultants help people decide between them. “You need to put some work into a gap year, because you don’t want to be twiddling your thumbs at home without enough to do and your friends are off at college,” says Bull. But taking some time away from school seems to pay off. Research shows that the grades of students who took gap years improved, and that gap year students were more likely to have higher grade point averages upon graduation than similar students who didn’t take gap years. More than half of gap year students surveyed said their experiences set them on a career path or solidified their choice of academic major. Given such findings, schools are becoming more receptive to students who defer. Harvard encourages students to take time off, and Princeton and Tufts offer gap programs. Florida State University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill offer financial assistance toward gap year programs. “Just about everybody allows
NIC K UT/AP
YOUNG PEOPLE ARE OFTEN TALENTED IN MANY WAYS “BUT DON’T HAVE SOME BASIC SOFT SKILLS.”
NEWSWEEK
daughter of a sitting president. As The Washington Post noted, she may have less security with her as a result. “I think it makes a lot of sense for her,” says Bull. During Malia’s year off, she’s “probably going to be somewhat in the public eye but not quite in the same way, and then she’ll start at college when there’s not so much spotlight on her.” Meanwhile, Harvard awaits her arrival. Writing about Malia and her year-off announcement, a student quipped on a campus blog, “I guess that means one less year of our friendship.”
61
0 5 / 2 7/ 2 0 1 6
TEENS TODAY/BOOKS
PEGGY SUE GOT SEXTED
For her new book, Nancy Jo Sales spoke to 200 teen girls. The takeaway: Many of them feel constantly harassed about sex NANCY JO SALES has a special gift: the ability to talk—really talk—to teenagers. From New York City rap hipsters to the notorious, fame-obsessed teen burglars that Sales dubbed “the Bling Ring,” the author and veteran journalist can get teenagers to open up about almost anything. For her new book, American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers, Sales spent two years on the road listening to over 200 teenage girls talk about what plagues them today. Sales, the mother of a high school freshman, has delivered a harrowing compendium of anecdotes about coming of age in an era of mainstream sexualization, slut shaming, online porn and cyberbullying. She spoke to Newsweek about why she wrote the book and what she learned about preparing teen girls— including her own—to grow up female online.
Q Where did you grow up, and what kind of a teenage life did you have? A
I grew up in Miami in the 1970s. I loved my parents; my parents loved me. I went to a good public high school. I grew up in this unusually diverse atmosphere, all sexual orientations and all colors—people who followed gurus, hippies. It was good, but what I remember was that my mother always had this very strong sense of what was age-appropriate for children. I really was schooled in that concept from her: Certain things are OK at certain times. NEWSWEEK
BY NINA BURLEIGH @ninaburleigh
62
0 5 / 2 7/ 2 0 1 6
aesthetic, and there are sexual comments. It’s all about likes; it’s all about the validation. The one thing that’s different from when we were kids is there’s a number on your popularity and everyone knows it. What gets a lot of likes is you in a bikini. And then so-called “slutpages” are in every school I went to [during reporting], and there’s a sexting ring in every school. These are amateur porn sites. There’s a whole minimizing thing that goes on, like, “It’s just a prank.” But it leads to terrible cyberbullying and sometimes suicide. The pictures are like Pokémon cards to the boys, who use them to jerk off or as a trophy. This is a cultural phenomenon. I began to see how deeply entrenched this is in the lives of teenage girls. I was not aware of it, and I felt so bad for them, that they were trying to deal with this. And the boys too, because “bro” culture is boy culture, and boys are overwhelmed. It’s also really homophobic. It’s not just sexist.
What is the biggest difference between female American teenage-hood in the 1970s and now? A
Nobody is saying kids haven’t always been interested in sex—we all were—but I think what’s different is that access to pornography has changed how kids view sex in a big way. If you had asked me two years ago, “What do you think of porn?” I would have said, “Whatever, live and let live.” I really have a different view now that I have looked at it. Gonzo porn is the most popular version, and it’s very degrading to women. We know from studies that porn influences girls’ views of themselves and their bodies. This is a huge, huge change. The way this relates to social media is that online culture is influenced by this porn aesthetic—Tumblr is almost like a porn site. Also, iPhones. My book is about porn-plusiPhone. It is changing childhood and teenage life.
KNOPF DOUBLEDAY
Q Are you sure you don’t just feel the same generational difference that parents in the 1960s felt about their kids and free love, or their grandparents felt about making out in cars? A
+ PARENT TRAP:
Sales says many parents want to be their child’s friend, so they don’t discipline them. “The girls say, ‘Why do our parents let us do all these adult things?’”
I hear that all the time. “Oh, it’s always been that way, it’s just moral panic.” I am sorry, but there should be a word for the opposite impulse of moral panic—maybe there’s a German word for it. It’s denial. Sure, the car was once considered a dangerous thing because kids could drive off and neck. Well, now you can be doing an approximation of that in math class. You can be sexting at school, [watching] porn at school. It used to be that Saturday night, you might have an experience. Now it can happen all the time. It happens when you open your eyes in the morning and get sexted. The constancy of it—we can ask, Is it healthy?
Q So what’s the takeaway? A
More than 200 girls in my book agree that there is a lot of harassment. They are pressured into sexualizing themselves; they are more vulnerable to
“PORN-PLUS-IPHONES IS CHANGING CHILDHOOD AND TEENAGE LIFE.” cyberbullying. People need to know that these girls are concerned. More than half of the book is in their voices—it’s one thing to hear an adult say it; it’s another thing to hear a kid say it. We have to change this culture. We cannot have a generation of girls growing up like this. We have to have a conversation about porn—parents can’t be afraid to say, “Nope, you are not doing that.” Schools can institute sessions where kids can talk to each other about this, so it’s not like an adult telling you what to think. It might be useful for sessions to be single-sex and then join them together. Some of the best conversations I had were when the girls started talking to each other. They said, “We never talk about this.” The law hasn’t caught up to the technology. Girls are so vulnerable to having these pictures passed around. They know this is out there, and they have this incredible feeling of threat that has got to be addressed. Only a small percentage of boys will rape, but a lot more will press a button and send a picture. It’s e-rape.
Q You have a daughter. Do you monitor her social media life and phone? A
I feel really lucky because when I started doing the first story on this for Vanity Fair, she was only 12 and didn’t have a phone yet. I was able to learn about all these things and start having this ongoing conversation with her. We talk about this every day. She tells me about things that are going on in her peer group. It’s something you have to talk to them about. Like, what happened in school today? What happened on social media today? Q Will you talk about how social media affects consent and body image? A
A lot of social media is posting provocative pictures. These girls are styling themselves to a porn NEWSWEEK
63
0 5 / 2 7/ 2 0 1 6
It really helps. Or maybe stop following Kendall and Kylie on Instagram. Constantly comparing yourself to others is no way to live. Also, sleep in as much as you can.”
TEENS TODAY/ ADVICE
Bill Gates, Microsoft co-founder “Solve the hard problems. Imagine life without energy: no electricity, gasoline or any other source. That’s life for about 1.3 billion people—18 percent of the world’s population. If we really want to help them, we need to find a way to get them cheap, clean energy. If you’re someone with some crazy-sounding ideas to solve our energy challenge, the world needs you. You might just have the answer.”
WE WERE TEENS ONCE
Newsweek asked some of the biggest names in music, sports, TV and technology to answer the question ‘What advice do you have for teenagers?’ Katy Perry, pop star “Take some time to disconnect from your devices and connect with yourself—whether that’s 20 minutes a day by meditating or leaving your phone in the car on a hike—to allow your mind to have an uninterrupted train of thought, which breeds creativity.” Misty Copeland, principal dancer at American Ballet Theatre “Know that this is just the beginning. You are finding your feet, voice and identity now, but your
growth is far from over. Be patient and work incredibly hard.Be careful not to step on people to get to where you want to go.” Bill Nye, TV host, noted “Science Guy” “If you’re like me, being a teenager makes you nervous. Oh, the questions! Am I going to go to college? Do I need to go to college? Where? Am I popular, or well-liked among those I’d like to like me? It goes on and on. In show business, there’s a saying: ‘If you quit being nervous, quit
NEWSWEEK
doing it.’ The key is to turn that nervousness, about whatever—college entrance exams, learning to drive, learning to flirt, learning which people, and especially which parties, to avoid—into excitement.” Nikki Glaser, comedian “It seems unavoidable that you will develop some kind of paralyzing insecurity in your teens. These insecurities will hold you back in every aspect of your life, so be brave and talk to someone about it.
64
0 5 / 2 7/ 2 0 1 6
Von Miller, Super Bowl 50 MVP “As human beings, consistency is our toughest challenge. To be the same person every day, to be better every day or to evolve into a different person. Consistency is the foundation for all. Be consistent! The Earth has done it—for 4.5 billion years, to be exact!” Carly Rae Jepsen, singer and songwriter “It’s nice to realize that high school is just a phase. You kind of live in this little bubble of high school, and it’s really cool to look at some of the people who came out of my school and see what they’re doing now. Almost all the people who have the worst time in high school end up being the coolest individuals. Some of the biggest ‘weirdos’ end up being the coolest people to know in adulthood.”
BY RYAN BORT @ryanbort AND ZACH SCHONFELD @zzzzaaaacccchhh AND STAV ZIV @stavziv
CLOCKWISE FROM L EFT: JIM ROGASH/GE T T Y; MIKE S EGAR /REUTERS; LLOYD B ISHOP/NBC/GET T Y; ANDREW KE LLY/REUTERS; AL LE N B ERE ZOVSKY/GET T Y; CHESNOT/GET T Y; STEVE MARCUS/REUTERS; D DIPASUPIL /GET T Y
Michael Jordan, basketball star “The best piece of advice I can offer is to not be afraid to fail. No one gets everything right the first time. By working hard and learning from your failures, you come out stronger and smarter.”