In the book, King addresses loving people responsible for racial segregation and violence against Black Americans, but he does so without ever condoning racial harm.

While King’s understanding of forgiveness flowed from his theology, psychology offers a perspective on whether forgiveness may be more or less helpful for us when a broader social offense has been committed or is ongoing. Though most forgiveness research has looked at offenses between two people—like friends or family members—a few efforts have tried to understand intergroup offenses, like racism. Even wrongs committed between two community members in the U.S. and elsewhere happen within an inescapable reality shaped by race.

Thus, for Americans from racially marginalized groups, considering whether to forgive involves taking into account our individual wellness, as well as the historical context and the social and cultural worlds we live in.

Racial pressure to forgive

On the whole, forgiveness should be viewed within a larger context, says Michael Perez, a social psychologist at Wesleyan University, particularly when it comes to race. If social justice is yet to be achieved, then forgiveness has some risks.

In a courtroom in October 2018, Brandt Jean hugged and forgave Amber Guyger, a white off-duty officer, for fatally shooting his older brother Botham Jean in his Dallas apartment, drawing media fascination with his forgiveness in spite of her murder conviction.

Perez, who was a psychology Ph.D. student at Texas A&M University at the time, became troubled by the coverage. It held echoes of the racially motivated gunning down of nine Mother Emanuel AME Church congregants in Charleston in 2017. “What I felt was that in those instances because the forgiveness was so front and center the racial components of this case [melted into the background]. It was the forgiveness that took up all the narrative oxygen,” he says.

Perez prompts mental health professionals and psychologists to consider the social context of racism when public forgiveness is expressed through Black pain.

Historian and journalist Stacey Patton wrote for the Washington Post, “Black pain is only heard after forgiveness is afforded to these white perpetrators. Black rage is challenged as inappropriate and unhelpful, while the media and others celebrate the traumatized family members’ ability to respond to this latest heinous crime with compassion and love. When black forgiveness is the means for white atonement, it enables white denial about the harms that racist violence creates. When black redemption of white America is prioritized over justice and accountability, there is no chance of truth and reconciliation. It trivializes real black suffering, grief, and the heavy lifting required for any possibility of societal progress.”

If you are not white, Perez says, there may be “cultural expectations of decorum and how you should engage” that stigmatize anger or pushback. Perez worries about the risk of coerced forgiveness when society almost expects forgiveness from certain racialized groups.

In recent years, as public shootings of Black people receive attention, communication scholars have turned an eye to analyzing Black forgiveness whenever a socially visible violence occurs. Communication scholar Daniel Morris documents how news reporters frequently ask the relatives of victims of police brutality if they will forgive the perpetrators.

“We maintain that the wider public not only expects a rhetoric of forgiveness when racial ghosts of the past (and present) manifest in ways that cause Black pain but also those grief-stricken Black families must offer the forgiveness in non-threatening and [expeditious] ways that eases public consciences,” write scholars Andre Johnson and Earle Fischer.

Therefore, an individual choice to forgive may be influenced by larger societal pressures to do so, not just religious pressure but also racial pressure. 

In broader culture, Perez argues, Black forgiveness narratives may reinforce the idea that we live in a more equitable, colorblind society than we actually do, thus letting society off the hook from having to dismantle systems of injustice.

“A lot of the prevailing literature is that forgiveness is letting a weight down. But the pressure to forgive can actually be quite burdensome,” says Perez. The field needs “more people to really think about the idea of how racism can permeate seemingly positive things.”

One of researcher Robert Enright’s (non-sequential) four phases of forgiveness is examining your anger. Perez says we must afford people the right to process that anger on their own timeline. “Sometimes we shy away from the negative emotions,” he says. “But anger gets people to push for change.”

Perez worries that forgiveness just “helps Black people survive in a toxic environment of racism as opposed to addressing the sociocultural worlds that reproduce racism.”

Forgiveness as a coping mechanism

However, despite our social realities, Perez recognizes that some individuals choose forgiveness as a part of their journey. For some, forgiveness may serve as a coping mechanism to survive the environment in which they live day to day—and it may have some benefits.

African Americans who cultivate forgiveness as a general disposition have decreased depressive symptoms, according to a study by Jasmin Brooks Stephens, a University of California, Berkeley, psychologist. She surveyed 101 African American college students who said they had experienced racial discrimination.

Approximately 27% of them met criteria for clinical depression, and the more racial discrimination they said they experienced, the higher their depression symptoms. But this link was weaker when people had a higher tendency to forgive.

The findings corroborated a 2017 study, which found that African American men who practiced forgiveness developed fewer depressive symptoms even as they experienced everyday racial discrimination. However, younger men reported experiencing racism more often and struggled more with depression and granting forgiveness.

Several scholars have also looked at forgiveness through the lens of health.

In a 2012 article, sociologist Michael McFarland, an associate professor at Florida State University, and his colleagues explored the results from a 2001 nationally representative survey of older American Christians—both Blacks and whites. The study found that Blacks who have a more forgiving disposition are less likely to experience alcohol abuse and chronic health conditions.

But those who lived in rundown neighborhoods did not experience the same benefits. They found that Blacks who live “in more deteriorated neighborhoods may not receive the health benefits from forgiveness that those in less deteriorated neighborhoods receive.”

Together, these studies suggest forgiveness has benefits for those who belong to racial minority groups, but they may be limited when other social factors are not addressed.

Forgiveness as a benefits and risk assessment

Michael McCullough, a psychologist at the University of California San Diego, finds that people can cultivate unforgiveness as a survival mechanism, particularly in communities that receive underinvestment. Neighborhood culture there may encourage unforgiveness or even revenge to protect people from more harms. Being forgiving could be perceived as weakness and make someone vulnerable to being taken advantage of.

McCullough studies forgiveness through an evolutionary lens. He theorizes about what conditions lead to forgiveness.

After an offense, a victim has different choices about how to respond. In a 2021 review, McCullough and his colleague Thomas McCauley write, one option is to simply avoid the offender to reduce the likelihood of being harmed again—but that might be difficult depending on any prior relationship to the offender. The victim could take revenge, but that might have its own risks. Both of these strategies also run another risk: losing access to whatever benefits the exploiter offers, such as employment or educational opportunities, financial benefits, or even belonging, love, or acceptance.

Forgiveness might become the right solution, but it depends on the conditions that exist in a particular scenario. For example, a nonprofit that supports BIPOC youth relies on a high-profile donor. The donor makes some insensitive comments that reveal racial biases and are hurtful to staff members, who are also primarily members of these racial groups. In this case, the donor is a long-time partner of the organization and plays a vital role in connecting them to others in the community.

McCullough and his colleagues have found that our decision to forgive is related to our calculation of both the threat of future harm and the value of our relationship with the offender, though neither of these are necessarily the only clear cause of our choice to forgive.

If when confronted, the donor is dismissive and shows no intention to change, staff members might still choose a type of forgiveness to preserve the relationship, while remaining guarded around him. After all, the options to either avoid the offender or take revenge contain their own risks to the stability of the nonprofit.

But if the donor apologizes and takes accountability for the harm by committing to a racial bias training, the nonprofit director might value the relationship more and believe his staff is less likely to be harmed again—thus, encouraging forgiveness.

Intergroup forgiveness

Another line of inquiry is attempting to measure and define forgiveness in an intergroup setting, specifically as it applies to race-related offenses.

In 2015, Georgia State University psychologist Don Davis and his colleagues tested a newly created intergroup forgiveness survey with African American students, who answered questions about their decision to forgive, their perceptions of the value of relationships with an offending group, and how much they predicted being exploited by that group. Students also filled out questionnaires on forgiveness and microaggressions.

They found that students frequently chose to avoid the group—rather than forgive—when they did not judge relationships with that group to be valuable or thought future harm to be likely. The more they felt exploited, the more often they chose a strategy of revenge.

Taking it a step further, Davis and his colleagues asked a separate group of racially or ethnically marginalized students about how committed they were to religion and how connected they were to their racial or ethnic identity, alongside their intergroup forgiveness.

Within the population studied, their findings hinted that people with a stronger racial or ethnic identity showed more intergroup forgiveness. Of the participants, 72.5% had a strong racial or ethnic identity and were more likely to forgive, while the rest were less forgiving but varied in their sense of identity.

People with more religious commitment tended to show particular aspects of forgiveness indicating a decision to forgive—e.g., “I have made a commitment to forgiving them” and “My choice is to forgive them.” Davis says that this might support the idea that intending to forgive can be a coping strategy, similar to Stephens’s notion of forgiveness.

This research shows that interpersonal and intergroup forgiveness appear to be different things. Furthermore, members of the same group choose different strategies in response to race-based offenses, which only sometimes include forgiveness.

Radical forgiveness

Meanwhile, Perez agrees that there might be insights to learn from how Black Christians during the Civil Rights Movement reframed forgiveness not as weak but as power. Public, radical love expressed in peaceful protest highlighted the depths of racist hatred and aimed to move sympathetic whites to join them in social change.

In King’s writing on forgiveness, he was elaborating on the biblical text where Peter asked Jesus how many times he should forgive a brother who sinned against him. While Peter asks if seven times is enough, Jesus challenges him to 70 times that amount.

King’s elaboration is that no one who forgives that much could do so without forgiveness becoming a permanent character trait. Yet it is by displaying that inner change—actively standing against injustice using (in his case) faith-informed non-violent civil action—that puts on display the depth of the evil underlying racial discriminations.

In a later chapter in “Strength to Love,” King wrote about loving our enemies: “Throw us in jail, and we shall still love you. Bomb our homes and threaten our children, and we shall still love you. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our community at the midnight hour and beat us and leave us half dead, and we shall still love you. But be ye assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer. One day we shall win freedom, but not only for ourselves. We shall so appeal to your heart and conscience that we shall win you in the process, and our victory will be a double victory.”

King’s aim was to forgive so hard and thoroughly that justice would flow.

A new Gallup Poll conducted in the United States paints a different picture of the state of kindness. Researchers surveyed over 2,000 American adults asking them to report on their everyday experiences—how often they’d witnessed kindness or received kindness from someone else—as well as how comfortable they were to initiate kindness toward a stranger. By asking individuals about their personal experiences (as opposed to their general impressions based on the current zeitgeist), the researchers found that kindness in the U.S. is more alive and well than we might expect.

“Kindness is swirling all around us, but the perception by ordinary people is that it’s not,” says Stuart Muszynski, president and chief executive officer of the Values-in-Action Foundation and codesigner of the poll. “There’s a kindness perception gap.”

The good news about kindness

Muszynski and his colleagues found that a majority of Americans reported seeing kindness regularly in their everyday lives. Sixty percent said that they’d seen people acting in kind, respectful ways often or very often, while 65% said they’ve been the recipients of kind acts from someone in their community within the last seven days.

Also, 73% said that they viewed other Americans as generally very kind or somewhat kind—a figure that belies our worries to the contrary.

“What shows up in the media every day is a very unkind America,” says Muszynski. “At the grassroots level, people see kindness every day. It’s around us all the time.”

An even higher percentage of those polled, 90%, said they would be very comfortable or somewhat comfortable initiating a kind act toward a stranger—a heartwarming finding. Muszynski points out that this reflects the fact that people who witness kindness are more willing to pay it forward.

“If you see kindness, you do kindness,” says Muszynski. “It’s a natural empathy reaction.”

Experiences of kindness may vary with age

Despite the good news, Muszynski noted some nuances around the findings. For example, younger adults were less likely to witness kindness or be the recipients of kind acts, giving them a less favorable outlook on the state of kindness in our country.

Young adults also felt less comfortable than older adults offering kindness to someone they don’t know. Only 35% of 18 to 29 year olds said they were very comfortable initiating a kind act toward a stranger—significantly less than the 49% of 30 to 49 year olds and the 64% of adults 65 and older that said the same.

“An individual is much more likely to see kindness, report kindness, and do kindness, and then that drops for individuals in the 18- to 29-year-old bracket,” says Muszynski. “That was really, really surprising to us as well as to Gallup.”

Muszynski speculates that this may be due to how distressed younger generations are. He notes that this age group has lived through the 2008 recession, increased political polarization, the COVID-19 pandemic, escalating climate change, and the rise of social media culture. These all could have added to their sense of isolation or feeling the need to look out for themselves first, making it more difficult for kindness to flourish.

“If you’re growing up with an individual as well as collective perception that there’s not kindness around you, you’re not necessarily going to feel comfortable [offering] kindness,” he says.

It could also be that younger adults are generally unhappier than their elders, for developmental reasons. Studies suggest that younger adults experience less positive and more negative emotion than older adults—in part due to older people benefitting from better emotion regulation skills. A poorer mood or outlook could have an impact on their kind behavior, as happier people tend to be kinder.

A recent Pew Research poll found that younger adults report greater mental health challenges than older adults, too, which means they will likely have less energy or emotional bandwidth to reach out to others in need.

Muszynski fears that because young people are more plugged in to the negative messages in social media, it could lead them to expect less kindness in the world. He points to research by Stanford University psychologist Jamil Zaki that found students had overly pessimistic views of how empathic and friendly other students were, based on false beliefs rather than fact. Once Zaki and his colleagues created a campaign to alert students to the fallacy of that narrative, students were much more open to engaging with one another.

“It’s really about social norms and the influence that social norms have in any kind of ecosystem,” says Muszynski.

How real is the kindness age gap?

Of course, one Gallup survey doesn’t paint the full picture on American kindness. Additional research adds context.

A recent meta-analysis pooling together findings from several studies around the world found that, overall, older adults tended to be kinder than younger adults—like the Gallup Poll. However, the difference between groups depended on the type of kindness offered. Older adults tended to be more open to sharing money or resources than younger adults; when it came to assisting someone or comforting them, the age differences were much smaller or unclear.

“Older adults may be more generous in some ways, but they are not necessarily more prosocial in every kind of situation,” says David Shum, coauthor of the study and a neuropsychologist at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

Shum and his colleagues also found that a person’s financial situation affected kind behavior. The differences in prosociality based on age were much stronger when an older person had a high level of income than when they didn’t. This suggests that a person’s socioeconomic status could play a role in kindness, too, and that the age difference effect may reflect a difference in means.

“If younger adults have fewer resources, they may appear less prosocial in some situations, even if they still care about others,” says Shum.

Complicating the picture, other research raises questions about whether age and other demographics are actual factors in kindness—and, if so, why.

For example, one study in Germany found that younger adults were actually more prosocial than older adults overall, though the type of kindness mattered, too. As people aged, their willingness to engage in genuine kindness (benevolence) or norm-based kindness (reciprocity or helping to promote fairness) decreased, perhaps because they had fewer resources. The opposite finding from the Gallup poll could be due to the study’s different time, place, and culture, as well as how kindness was measured (experimentally, in addition to self-report).

Muszynski believes economic stress could keep people from being more kind if they are focused more on survival. But economic factors couldn’t completely account for the age differences he found in the Gallup poll. While the poll did find that less educated and poorer people were more uncomfortable helping a stranger than those with more education and income, younger adults within those groups were still less comfortable reaching out to others than older people within those same groups.

We can all learn to be kinder

Regardless of the research on an actual age difference in kindness in the United States, everyone, old and young, could be nudged toward acting kinder. After all, kindness is a universal value, vital to the health of individuals as well as our nation. And it’s often contagious.

Fortunately, small, individual acts of kindness are pretty much the norm, not only in the United States but around the world. As the authors of an international study on kind behavior found, “requests for assistance are very frequent and mostly successful; and when people decline to give help, they normally give a reason.” Though cultural variations impact how this looks, kindness generally begets more kindness—just as Muszynski’s results suggest.

So, how to encourage more kindness to spread? It may be important to remind people that we tend to underestimate the value of our kindness toward others, thinking it won’t matter that much, when it does. Sometimes we have to just overcome our reluctance to step out of our comfort zone in order to initiate kindness toward a stranger and to see how nice it can be. For tips on how to do that in your everyday life, Greater Good offers several research-based kindness practices for any age group.

To Muszynski, part of the solution lies in making ongoing, everyday kindnesses easier to notice. Sometimes, people don’t label everyday actions as kind acts, he says; we don’t recognize that the nurse caring for us is being kind (not just doing their job) or that listening to a grieving friend is an act of kindness. He hopes to encourage more kind acts through a public kindness challenge that he and his team developed.

“I believe that the solution is to change the paradigm, change the dialogue, change the ability for people to see and understand kindness,” says Muszynski.

Wherever and whoever you are, it never hurts to practice kindness in your own life. We all have the opportunity to build a culture of kindness, making for a more perfect and compassionate union.

This phenomenon creates an exceptional opportunity for college and university faculty. Not only can they teach content, but they can help students cultivate character virtues needed for adult life and potentially see them spread throughout many areas of society.

Without too much heavy lifting, faculty can create classroom conditions that cultivate virtues like open-mindedness, awareness, empathy, and democratic citizenship. These virtues can help increase students’ capacity for ethical decision making, leadership, and professional growth, which are crucial for responsible participation in society.

As young people tackle heightened ideological polarization and partisan hostility in the U.S., they need the right tools to navigate tough conversations and connect with others whose lives look different from their own. Universities can offer a safe and structured, yet intellectually challenging, environment for their students to practice character virtues that are essential to a healthy society.

What university experiences support character development?

Our project team wanted to understand how students’ experiences at our university affect their capacity to cultivate character virtues. To do this, we conducted 12 focus groups with 51 undergraduate students, asking them to reflect on the aspects of their course experiences that either supported or hindered them in developing character virtues. Below are some key takeaways.

1. Activities that promote perspective taking and productive disagreement can support students in practicing virtues such as open-mindedness, awareness, and empathy. Examples of these activities varied in scope. Several students spoke about the importance of building meaningful relationships with peers, both inside and outside the classroom. They often mentioned how these opportunities were crucial in nurturing virtues related to open-mindedness and empathy.

Within classes, students highlighted that their most meaningful peer relationships were facilitated through working with members of their program cohort, participating in project-based group work, or discussing topics with partners. For example, students talked about how working in small-group settings encouraged them to build trust with one another, ultimately fostering a classroom environment that encouraged authentic dialogue and productive disagreement:

The [program] cohort that I’m in [is] still small enough where I could probably name everybody, and a fun fact about them, and like that’s super cool, because then I can also disagree with everybody because I feel comfortable, knowing who they are and I know their values, and I know how to contradict them in a way that’s productive versus just like arguing at someone for hours, [that] doesn’t get you very far.

One student, for example, recounted her experience completing an assignment that required her to interview someone who held a different political viewpoint from her. She shared:

I think [my Political Dialogue class is] where I started working on my open-mindedness . . . because [I realized] everyone has a deeper root for what they believe in. There was one guy I had to meet with and talk with, and the reason he was more [politically] conservative was because he grew up in the [Great] Depression era, and his [conservatism] came from the economic side. [This assignment] was really wonderful, because you also learn these skills of talking to people and presenting empathy and open-mindedness [to others].

One student shed light on how her course experiences have helped her grow in her ability to be more curious and less judgmental about people with different views than her own:

[My classes] allow me to have a wider perspective of people’s backgrounds, views, and ideas, and why they have them, even if it’s someone that I don’t agree with. I still appreciate being exposed to that. I think the way my classes are structured really help me learn from a different perspective . . . my professor will take time out of the beginning of class to literally put all [our] desks in a circle so that we look at each other when we speak. It’s little things like that that help with my moral development . . . when I leave [university], I’ll know how to properly listen to a person, ask follow-up questions, and ask clarifying questions . . . little things like that [can] help me learn about someone holistically rather than just [think] “they said a statement” and then I judge it based off of the statement.

2. Personal connections with instructors who show empathy help cultivate environments where students feel comfortable asking questions and sharing opinions. It is not surprising that students emphasized the critical role their instructors play. Specifically, they shared the importance of instructors demonstrating effort in building authentic and meaningful relationships with their students, and being accessible (such as lingering at the end of class, showing up where students spend time, making clear that faculty have time for and are interested in helping students, and providing office hours but also expressing to students how to use these office hours [e.g., “Come and chat”]).

Students also mentioned how the classroom culture set by their instructor influenced how comfortable they felt to express their opinions generally, but also how likely they were to engage in authentic dialogue with their peers:

I’m an [education] major, so a lot of our classes [involve] discussions. I feel [like this] relates a lot to being open-minded. I feel like a lot of the discussions in classes . . . the space is a lot more welcoming, for disagreement and challenging different ideas. And I feel like the professors are very supportive of that, too. I’ve also found that a lot of professors in that school [the School of Education and Human Development] are more willing to foster relationships with their students.

Not all students had positive experiences. Some students spoke about times when instructors created hostile classroom environments that discouraged authentic participation. One Black student shared about a time her professor used a racial slur and how this impacted her psychological safety:

I think that censorship is a big theme in classrooms and . . . I think that students don’t feel like they can truly express themselves because professors are not cultivating an environment where respectful debate is welcome. . . . I know one professor in particular—I love him, but he said something crazy . . . the N-word. And he’s white and tenured. That power dynamic gives you the ability to say something like that and not receive repercussions. . . . But students can’t. . . and that challenges your ability to truly like authentically, be yourself in the classroom. So, I appreciate when professors are who they are, but they are cognizant of the demographics that they are teaching. And even if those demographics are not in the room, they’re constantly including those demographics in their discussions, because to me, that’s true allyship and advocacy.

This example illustrates how important it is for instructors to be aware of their own personal attributes and past experiences, the power differences between them and their students, and the intersection of the two—especially in classrooms that include students with marginalized identities.

3. Understanding the relevance of course content within the real world impacts students’ virtue development. Students crave opportunities to apply their new classroom knowledge to real-world situations linked to current events in society. One student, for example, described how seeing real-life applications deepened their understanding of how they can exercise their civic-related virtues to make the world a better place:

I think using a real-life application project as a way to facilitate diversity [is meaningful]. I remember going to a conference two months ago and seeing a . . . competition where entrepreneurs pitched ideas about how they can use AI or machine learning or any type of technology to improve, for example, maternal health for Black mothers, since we are more likely to die in childbirth. . . . It’s really cool to see how innovative these projects can be and how it can help a lot of people who come from underrepresented backgrounds, or anyone who just wants the problem solved. So more of those real-life examples [in the classroom].

Though students want their learning to connect to real-world situations, it is not always feasible for instructors to implement experiential learning opportunities. Courses are already packed with specialized content and sometimes serve as a prerequisite for other courses. Saying yes to one type of content might mean saying no to another.

Yet we see that college student engagement has dropped in recent years—students, on average, spent 1.7 fewer hours attending classes, discussion sections, and labs in 2022–23 than in 2018–19. Is it possible that incorporating real-world situations would enhance engagement? What if every semester included at least one course built around real-world, experiential learning? This might include asking students to follow a current news topic related to the course content for the full semester, creating assignments that require students to engage with community members, or learning about a local problem related to course content (e.g., local water testing in chemistry, or analyzing data from the city on problems like transportation or affordable housing in a data analysis class).

If it is too difficult to rework curriculum to create real-world opportunities, faculty can turn to other means to engage students in real-world experiences. At least 65% of students enrolled in college engage in research with faculty, extracurricular activities with student organizations, or civic participation. That raises the question—are there ways that instructors can create connections between students’ classes and their daily lives and activities outside of class?

What university experiences hinder character development?

Students were also candid in sharing aspects of their lives that can sometimes limit or challenge their capacity to engage in virtue development:

1. Being the “bigger person” in every situation is difficult to sustain. It is difficult for students to engage in perspective taking and practice open-mindedness with beliefs that oppose their own. One student, for example, reflected on how she grapples with expressing empathy with others, especially to those who hold perspectives that oppose her personal values:

I think sometimes it’s really hard to be compassionate and empathetic when I just don’t understand why [someone is] doing that. And then there’s also the idea of being fundamentally different from somebody, and somebody’s fundamental views on life and morals, are just different from my own and so it’s sometimes hard to give people any benefit of the doubt when I’m like, You’re representing something that I fundamentally disagree with.

2. Students expressed feeling uncertain about their future. This can make it difficult for them to prioritize practicing certain civic virtues, such as social action, because they are focused on how to navigate their own uncertainties ahead.

Students expressed concerns regarding navigating an unstable job market, finding a job related to their degree, and ultimately establishing a career that is aligned with their values and how they want to contribute to society:

I’m currently about to graduate and I’ve accepted one job over another job. . . . I did have two [job] offers that I felt like both of them would have been making a positive change in the world, and would kind of get me closer to where I wanted to be in 5 to 10 years, but I picked one over the other largely because I feel really uncertain about where the economy is headed, where, like education in particular is headed. So, I chose a job over Teach for America, because I’m not super sure where the AmeriCorps is going to go. So yeah, I think financial stability matters to me. But I think at this point, making positive change also still really matters to me.

She also went on to share her concerns regarding the longevity of her career path, given current political realities:

As someone that’s studying public health intertwined in education, those are two things that I feel like are really being defunded or not invested in currently by the administration. Also, I got one of my offers rescinded initially, and that really sucked. I think that a huge challenge for me is trying to figure out and navigate this landscape of what do I do? [Do I choose] what I know will be good for my career in five years, post this [presidential] administration, or do I do what I need to do to be comfortable right now with where I’m at?

Young people will inevitably encounter circumstances that bump up against their character virtues. It is our responsibility, as educators, to provide our students with the tools they need to navigate these difficult moments, so they engage in ethical decision making. The best place to start, we’ve found, is by elevating the voices of your students and genuinely seeking to understand how you can best support their character development. So, start there: Listen first and create opportunities for students to stretch, practice, and apply virtues to real-life, day-to-day situations.

Yet they can change the feel of a day. 

Most people know this from experience. A tense morning can soften when someone treats us with unexpected warmth. A crowded commute can feel less anonymous when another person makes space. A classroom, workplace, neighborhood, or family can become more humane through gestures that are almost too brief to record.

In a recent paper in the International Journal of Wellbeing, we use the term “microkindness” to describe these moments, though the word itself has appeared in earlier work. We define them as small gestures, motivated at least in part by genuine warm feelings toward others, that benefit someone else. These acts are brief, often lasting less than five seconds, and they involve little personal cost or risk to the person offering them.

That definition may sound modest. It is meant to be. Microkindness is not heroic sacrifice, sustained caregiving, or major generosity. It is the tiny act of human regard that passes from one person to another in ordinary life.

But the fact that microkindness is small does not mean it is trivial. Indeed, its smallness may be part of its importance. Because such acts are easy to perform, they are available almost everywhere. Because they are brief, they can occur many times a day. And because they are social, they may not stop with the first person who receives them.

The intriguing possibility is that microkindness may spread.

The flip side of microaggressions

The idea of microkindness partly arises as a counterpart to the better-known concept of microaggressions: brief, often everyday words or behaviors that communicate disrespect, exclusion, or contempt. One lesson from that literature is that small things can matter, especially when they accumulate. A single slight may be brushed aside. Repeated exposure can become a burden.

Microkindness invites a parallel question in the positive direction. If small acts can wound, can small acts also repair, include, affirm, or encourage?

This does not mean that a warm smile cancels out injustice, or that individual kindness is a substitute for structural change. The point is more precise: Daily social life is partly made out of small signals. Human beings constantly communicate whether others are welcome, noticed, respected, and safe. A microkindness is one way of sending a positive signal.

In a classroom, this might mean a teacher smiling warmly at a student. In a workplace, it might mean acknowledging someone’s contribution in passing. In public, it might mean a brief friendly exchange with a cashier or neighbor. These moments do not ask much of us. But they can alter the emotional tone of an interaction.

They may also shape what others do next.

Kindness as something that travels

When people think about epidemiology, they usually think about disease: how viruses spread, who is most at risk, and how outbreaks can be prevented. But the broader tools of epidemiology can also be applied to positive states and behaviors. This is sometimes called positive epidemiology: the study of the distribution, causes, and spread of positive health-related qualities, not only illness and risk.

In the case of microkindness, the question becomes: Where do these small acts occur? What makes them more likely? Who receives them? Who is left out? Under what conditions do they ripple outward?

This way of thinking matters because kindness is often treated as a private moral choice. It is that, but it may also be a social phenomenon. People act within environments. A family, school, workplace, online platform, religious community, or neighborhood can facilitate kindness—or make it less likely to occur. Some settings invite warmth; others reward suspicion, speed, competition, or emotional distance.

Research on social networks suggests that emotions and behaviors can cluster and spread among people. Happiness, cooperation, and prosocial behavior are not merely individual traits floating in isolation. They can be shaped by relationships and social norms. If kindness operates in a similar way, then the smallest acts of goodwill may contribute to a larger social climate.

That does not mean kindness spreads automatically. A smile may be returned, ignored, or misread. A friendly gesture may land differently across cultures, contexts, or relationships. What feels warm in one setting may feel intrusive in another. The study of microkindness needs to take these complexities seriously.

Still, the possibility is worth investigating: Some acts of kindness may not only benefit the person who receives them. They may increase the chance that kindness continues.

Why a smile may matter

Our paper focuses especially on smiling as an example of microkindness. This is not because every smile is kind. Some smiles are fake. Some may even express superiority or pleasure at another person’s discomfort. Context matters.

But a genuine, kind smile is one of the clearest examples of a microkindness. It is brief. It costs little. It can communicate warmth, safety, recognition, and goodwill. It can be offered to people we know well and to people we barely know at all.

Smiling is also interesting because it is visibly social. A person’s smile can elicit a smile in return. That returned smile can affect the next interaction. In this way, smiling offers a simple case for thinking about how microkindness might move through a room, a classroom, a gathering, or a community.

Imagine entering a meeting where no one looks up. The room feels closed. Now imagine entering the same meeting and being greeted by one person’s warm smile. The agenda has not changed. The organization has not changed. But the social meaning of the moment has shifted. There is now a signal: You are seen. You belong here.

Such signals may be especially important in environments where people are uncertain about whether they are welcome. A student entering a new school, a patient in a medical office, a new employee on a first day, or an older adult entering a community event may all be scanning for cues. A microkindness can serve as one of those cues.

This does not require exaggerating what a smile can do. It simply recognizes that human beings are relational creatures. Much of our well-being is shaped not only by major life events but by the texture of daily contact.

Microkindness and flourishing

The Human Flourishing Program at Harvard defines flourishing broadly as the relative attainment of a state in which all aspects of life are good, including the contexts in which a person lives. Its framework often focuses on several domains: happiness and life satisfaction, physical and mental health, meaning and purpose, character and virtue, close social relationships, and financial and material stability.

Microkindness touches several of these at once.

It can support happiness, because warm social contact can lift the emotional tone of ordinary life. It can support mental health, not as a treatment in itself, but as one small part of a less hostile and more supportive social environment. It can support meaning, because offering kindness connects daily action to the good of another person. It can support character, because kindness is a habit of attending to others with goodwill. And it can support relationships, because relationships are built not only through major commitments but through repeated small gestures of care.

Microkindness is clearly not the whole of flourishing. But small acts are one part of the social world in which flourishing becomes more or less possible. They help create the atmosphere of a place. Over time, that atmosphere can influence what people expect from one another.

What this means in daily life

The practical implications of microkindness are intentionally modest, but not insignificant.

First, microkindness asks people to notice the many small opportunities for goodwill already built into the day. These are not elaborate interventions. They are brief acts of recognition: smiling, greeting, thanking, acknowledging, encouraging, or making space.

Second, it suggests that kindness may be especially powerful when it becomes part of a culture rather than an isolated act. A classroom in which students are greeted warmly, a workplace where people routinely acknowledge one another, or a community gathering where newcomers are welcomed may become an “epicenter” of microkindness. The goal is not forced cheerfulness. It is a shared norm of humane attention.

Third, it points to the role of institutions and media environments. If microkindness can spread, then the environments that shape attention matter. News and social media often amplify outrage, threat, and conflict. A healthier information environment might also make room for stories and signals of kindness, not as sentimental distraction, but as part of the social ecology that affects public life.

Finally, microkindness calls for humility. A gesture intended as kind is not always received that way. Cultural norms, power dynamics, prior experiences, and context all influence interpretation. Studying microkindness well will require attention not only to the person offering the act, but also to the person receiving it.

A small beginning toward a better world

The study of microkindness is still new. Our paper is an invitation to research, which asks whether the tools used to study the spread of disease might also help us understand the spread of kindness. It asks whether small gestures deserve more scientific attention. It asks whether societies concerned about polarization, loneliness, and distrust should pay closer attention to the brief moments in which people communicate goodwill.

That may seem like a small place to begin, but much of life happens in small places: in doorways, sidewalks, classrooms, checkout lines, waiting rooms, emails, meetings, and glances across a room.

A kinder society will require more than microkindness. It will require justice, patience, courage, forgiveness, strong institutions, and serious commitments to the common good. Still, the path toward such a society may be shaped, in part, by what people repeatedly communicate to one another in passing.

A smile. A greeting. A thank you. A moment of recognition.

Small acts may be bigger than we think.

Scaling up large health programs, working through complex systems, is what we do in global health. Guided by the science of epidemiology, we study how and why disease is distributed. We ask, why does disease “cluster,” affecting certain people, at certain times, in certain places? Understanding these patterns can provide the information needed to reduce the risk of disease and promote human health. So naturally, while listening to Jinpa, we wondered: could the statistical tools and methods of epidemiology also be used to “scale up” compassion? 

Epidemiology is a latecomer to compassion science. Psychologists and neuroscientists have studied compassion for decades. Spiritual traditions have taught compassion for centuries. Collectively, they have focused on cultivating the capacity for compassion in individuals. “Scaling up” requires broadening the field to include institutions, systems, and populations—which is precisely the strength of epidemiology. 

The novel idea that epidemiology might contribute to compassion science faced headwinds. Epidemiologists considered compassion to be too “soft,” too difficult to measure. Epidemiology is a quantitative science after all, for which precise measurement is crucial. On the other hand, compassion scholars and teachers warned that attempts to measure compassion would ruin it. Finding a “middle way” required innovative dialogue and interdisciplinary collaboration. We started with two exploratory meetings at the Task Force for Global Health, a review of the compassion science literature through an epidemiologic lens, and, in March 2026, a special issue of the International Journal of Wellbeing, “Towards an Epidemiology of Compassion”. Our intent was to encourage scholars and thinkers from other disciplines to contribute their insights into how an epidemiologic approach could help to build a more compassionate world.

Challenging questions

While epidemiology has proven its value in public health, we found that applying it to compassion requires wrestling with several fundamental questions. First, do we have the right conceptual framing for compassion at a population level—are we thinking about it in the right way? Compassion educators who regard compassion as an individual human skill are doubtful. Only individuals, they say—not organizations or communities—have the capacity for warm-heartedness, which is necessary for compassion. However, they concede that organizations differ in their capacity to acknowledge suffering and respond with compassion, just as individuals do: Some are more compassionate than others. A reliable framework for understanding why compassion clusters in some organizations or systems more than others could provide clues for nurturing compassion in all organizations.

A second question is whether current epidemiologic and statistical methods are up to the task of analyzing the complexity of factors, interacting at multiple levels, that determine the extent to which compassion is present and how it is expressed. These factors include individual intent; physical, relational, historical, and emotional influences; and environmental and cultural determinants, among others.

Perhaps the most critical question for an epidemiology of compassion is that of measurement: What should be counted? Even at the individual level, measures of compassion rarely capture its essence. A recent scientific review by psychologist Cassandra Vieten and her colleagues found 503 measures of compassion and empathy—evidence that consensus is lacking. At the population level, outside the controlled environment of a laboratory, the challenge is even more complex. Measures of intention, empathic resonance, brain activity, or physiologic changes—which are useful in experimental contexts—are neither feasible nor reliable for studying compassion in populations. Brendan Ozawa-de Silva and Jennifer Mascaro have argued that, at the macro level, compassion can be measured by how well it is institutionalized through policies and actions. But are such policies and actions the same as compassion? Not according to those who insist that compassion is a skill or trait only of individuals, or that, for action to be considered compassionate, we must know that it is motivated by a positive intent. 

Gaining momentum

What began years ago as a vaguely defined notion among a small group of enthusiasts is gaining momentum. As an example, “Towards an Epidemiology of Compassion” featured 23 articles by more than 90 authors from a broad range of disciplines. Significantly, the articles provided much-needed perspective on conceptual frameworks, epidemiologic methods, and measurement. 

Conceptual frameworks. Working independently, several groups have proposed new conceptual frameworks to guide an epidemiology of compassion. Each of these frameworks or conceptual models emphasizes the need to understand how compassion manifests at multiple levels, including the individual, collective, and societal levels. Some of the frameworks describe how compassion “flows” across these levels, while others focus on determinants of compassion at different stages of life. Taken together, these conceptual models highlight the emerging understanding of compassion at the collective level and open new lines of inquiry into collective expressions of compassion—actions that are possible only through the shared intention and coordinated work of many people.

We have argued elsewhere, for example, that the field of global health, which seeks to alleviate and prevent suffering at a global level, is a manifestation of compassion. Exciting recent work on organizational compassion by Ace Simpson, Monica Worline, Jane Dutton, and others goes beyond these frameworks to describe the processes and features that characterize compassionate organizations. These include, for example, compassionate leadership; communication networks that alert staff to the presence of pain or suffering; roles, routines, and social networks that facilitate alleviation of suffering; and the use of physical space to increase staff accessibility and interaction.

Methods. The convenings at the Task Force for Global Health confirmed that epidemiologic methods are well-suited to studying compassion at the institutional and population levels. Methods used in chronic disease epidemiology, in particular, are designed to handle the extraordinary complexity of multiple “risk factors” interacting across different levels and time points. Other epidemiologic methods, such as geospatial analysis, can be used to map where and when specific forms of suffering (such as hunger) occur and whether resources (such as food pantries) have been put in place to address that suffering.

Measures. Although a single ideal measure of compassion remains elusive, significant progress has been made in refining and triangulating measures of compassion, particularly in health care systems. For example, Shane Sinclair and his colleagues have developed companion measures of compassion that take the perspectives of both patients and health care providers. Taking a systems approach, Anupama Jha and her colleagues developed a suite of measures to evaluate the impact of compassion training and health systems transformation in district hospitals in Bihar, India. Beverley Fehr and Susan Sprecher recently applied an epidemiologic lens to synthesize two decades of psychological research that used the same existing measure—the Compassionate Love Scale—and provided fresh insight into the clustering of compassion by time, place, and person.

Looking to the future

Since Jinpa’s keynote address in 2018, we’ve seen a global outpouring of interest in compassion and how it moves through human systems. Along with this interest has come a desire for a scientific approach that can guide research and inform practical efforts to nurture compassion in institutions and systems. Epidemiology contributes a population-level lens to compassion science that can help reveal and quantitatively describe the interplay of factors that enable compassion to arise in specific settings. So, what is needed now for compassion science to realize its potential through epidemiology?

Broaden the conversation. As Jinpa noted, we must reach beyond our own community to broaden the conversation. We must include voices from other disciplines—as well as voices of those who do not align themselves with any academic discipline. Progress on the central challenge of measurement can come only from a thorough understanding of compassion in different cultures and settings, incorporating perspectives across the breadth of human experience. We must learn particularly from Indigenous communities and colleagues in the global South. We need the perspectives of evolutionary anthropologists, sociologists, primate biologists, artists, peacebuilders, spiritual leaders, and theologians. And the conversation should extend more deeply within epidemiology itself, for example, to explore how the tools of infectious disease modeling and social epidemiology can help us understand how compassion is transmitted or spread across populations. 

Conceptual frameworks. There is much to be learned from in-depth exploration and comparison of the new conceptual models of collective compassion. Broadening and deepening the conversation to refine, apply, align, and learn from the new conceptual models can lead to an integrated framework, a conceptual scaffolding for further research and testing of ideas. 

Data. Epidemiology is a data-driven science. Advances in conceptual frameworks inevitably lead to new questions and stimulate the search for data to answer those questions. There is much to be gained from epidemiologic analysis of existing data, as shown by Fehr and Sprecher, as well as from including compassion-related questions in new research on human flourishing, happiness, and well-being. For example, analysis of compassion-related questions in the Global Flourishing Study by Julia Nakamura and her colleagues provides intriguing insight into the spatial distribution of compassion at a global level.

Systems perspective. Compassion science has largely focused on the giving of compassion by individuals. The recent increase in scholarship and interest in self-compassion and receiving compassion from others has opened a rich inquiry into how compassion “flows” across these dimensions, as well as the implications of such flow for well-being and mental health. In unpacking their multi-level framework, James Kirby and his colleagues argue that the systems in which humans live and work not only facilitate or constrain the flow of compassion among individuals, but these systems also serve as “active agents that can give and receive compassion.” While they may not be capable of warm-heartedness, organizations “possess the primary driver of compassion: intention,” and they can be sensitive to suffering and committed to its alleviation. This radical approach opens a new landscape for compassion science, for which epidemiology, with its systems perspective, is well-suited. 

Influence on epidemiology. Historically, epidemiology has overwhelmingly focused on disease and threats to human health. Tyler VanderWeele and his colleagues recently argued that the tools of epidemiology also should be applied to promote human flourishing. An epidemiology of compassion opens the field to a broader “positive epidemiology,” similar to developments in positive psychology. By inviting narratives and first-person accounts of the experience of compassion, epidemiology will be stretched in new ways—not unlike the field of contemplative neuroscience.

Compassion and social justice. The systems perspective of epidemiology, with its attention to populations, leads to the unavoidable question, rarely explored in individual compassion training, whose suffering is to be alleviated? In prompting this question and providing an analytic framework to address and monitor it, epidemiology brings compassion science into much-needed conversation with ethics and social justice. 

We live in a world that seems increasingly polarized. The need for compassion at the institutional and societal levels has never been greater. Applying the epidemiologic toolkit and its systems perspective to compassion science will not be a panacea, but we and others believe that it can make important contributions, just as it has in global health. We look forward to working with others who share this view—and to engaging in conversation with those who don’t. And we are eager to see more writing, thinking, and noticing of the ways that compassion manifests in communities and organizations. These real-world observations and reflections, combined with robust epidemiologic methods, hold the potential to bring us to the next frontier in compassion science—and to answering Jinpa’s question about how to “scale up” compassion.

In Unreasonable Women, van der Leun follows three women whose experiences challenge familiar narratives about crime, punishment, and victimhood. Through years of dogged reporting, court records, and interviews, she traces how domestic violence, childhood trauma, poverty, and systemic failures shaped the choices these women made—and the harsh sentences many received.

I spoke with van der Leun over Zoom about criminalized survivors, the limits of self-defense law, and what it would take to create a more just system. Here is our interview, condensed and edited for clarity.

Hope Reese: You set out to discover how many women in U.S. prisons fall in this category of “criminalized survivors.” What drove you to research this yourself?

Justine van der Leun: I was reading a report called The Sexual Abuse to Prison Pipeline by an organization called The Human Rights Project for Girls, looking at the way that girls—in particular, Black girls—who were in the juvenile justice system had been sexually abused, often severely, before being incarcerated.

I was really interested in this idea of punishment, this further state punishment for this thing that had happened. But it was really hard to report on kids, to get permission—especially kids who don’t have parents. I abandoned that; I just didn’t know how to get in.

Then I learned about the idea of “survived and punished” from the group Survived and Punished. I ended up on Nikki’s case. And then I created this whole ridiculous project—in retrospect, what was I thinking?—to find how many criminalized survivors are there now.

HR: What did you learn? How many respondents reported experiencing abuse before entering the prison system?

JV: There’ve been studies that show that in certain facilities, up to 94% of women in prison have histories of domestic or sexual violence. And, anecdotally, I never really talked to somebody who didn’t—it’s almost everybody.

My research shows that 30% of respondents are criminalized survivors, and that’s probably like a vast undercount because I didn’t prime them. I didn’t ask specifically, “are you a criminalized survivor? Or “did you experience abuse or violence?”

One thing that I cannot know is how many women get off. How many times do prosecutors not charge? If you don’t get convicted, there’s no record of anything. So if a woman did, say, defend herself and they chose not to press charges—or try and they fail—then there’s really no way for me to find that person and then look at their characteristics and compare them. Everything is down to these individual DAs, for the most part.

HR: A recurring question, when it comes to these women and other victims of abuse, is “why didn’t she leave?” Can you address this?

JV: It’s a natural question that people who haven’t lived through this have. People think, “Well, if someone’s raping me, strangling me, putting me on Pornhub, or whatever, I would just go.”

Anyone who’s been through it knows that you can’t.

The simplest answer, looking at these situations, is that it’s not about if she decides to leave—it’s about if he lets her leave. So the decision is really not the survivor’s, the victim’s decision. It’s always the decision of the abuser.

We put the onus on her to leave, but in almost every single case that I’ve looked at, she wants to leave. But in domestic violence situations, the person being abused is so intricately aware of their abuser’s triggers and how they will react to everything. They know what will happen if they do. It’s not like you can make the free choice just to walk out.

Furthermore, as Nikki said to me once, “If he had thrown me on the ground and raped me the first date, I wouldn’t have been with him.” But the abuse is so gradual.

Also, when people have children and when people have lives together, it becomes so hard to disentangle yourself from these people—who’ve also convinced you that you’re worth nothing.

Gemma is one of the women in my book. She said it doesn’t matter how strong you are. It doesn’t matter what a badass you think you are. If somebody, day after day, isolates you and tells you that you’re a terrible mother, you’re going to lose your children, you’re worth nothing, nobody will want you—you start to believe it.

An abuser isolates you—or identifies someone who is already isolated—and gloms on to them. And when kids are involved, women wonder: How do I extract my child? Will he come for my child? Will the state come for my child? How do I remove my child from this life that they have with their dad?

Tanisha, she wanted to leave, but she would have been homeless if she did. So she stayed while trying to get her life together. And it’s not really a free choice, it’s like the other choices, like sleeping in your car, you know, are untenable.

For the other three women, everything that happened occurred when someone had left or was trying to leave. That’s the most dangerous time.

HR: Of children who have been abused, 77% face abuse in adulthood. Can you talk about how you observed this pattern in the women you wrote about?

JV: I haven’t been able to untangle it to the degree that I would like to. One expert said that the way they deal with trust is profoundly altered—they either trust too much or they don’t trust at all. The compass guiding them is a little broken.

Tanisha had been abused so much as a child, she almost took it as a given that a man would do this to her. She was abused in all of her relationships. I don’t know that she ever thought she was worth anything more, or knew that she was worth not getting abused—because that was her only experience in life.

Nikki’s childhood abuse—in all cases, actually—was never dealt with properly. So they couldn’t find healing. It was denied or like swept under the rug. And when you don’t heal from that, I don’t know how you can go forward and create healthy relationships when you have sexual trauma—stuff that you never got treatment for.

Even people who get treatment find it really hard to have healthy relationships later. So people who live on the margins have a lot of self-hate, shame, and worthlessness that they carry. Abusers are often really good at identifying that and coming into the lives of people like that, as well.

HR: And violence isn’t always registered by the person experiencing it. Gemma, for example, had been thrown against a glass coffee table that shattered—but she didn’t note it as abuse. Why do you think this happens?

JV: She told me, “That year was good.” Gemma would say that, first, she loved him and she got involved—and then he was abusive. The more I looked at it, the more I saw that he forced her into the relationship and the marriage—by strangulation and abuse, and by tracking her and stalking her. But because she felt that there was an inevitability to it, she may have tried to create, in her mind, a more pleasant reality in which she was choosing this and loved him.

Because the alternative was that she was being like forced and raped and strangled into a relationship. I think she wrote off a lot of things because she kind of had to, to live her life and to keep going. Including the coffee table incident. She had created a bit of an alternate reality.

HR: Beginning in the 1970s, lawyers defending or helping women with cases of criminalized survival advised them to plead insanity rather than self-defense. Why is self-defense so difficult to prove?

JV: I called the book Unreasonable Women because for a long time, the jury was tasked with deciding if a defendant acted as a hypothetical “reasonable man” would have acted. They were supposed to put themselves in the person’s shoes and answer, “Would a reasonable person have done the same, knowing the same things, having the same fears?”

There was never really a reasonable woman. Later it was turned to the “reasonable person standard.” So self-defense has typically been conceived of as the idea of like two men outside of a bar, equally sized, having a fight—would a reasonable man in that situation have reacted thusly?

A woman in a domestic violence situation—what is reasonable to her, knowing what she knows—is quite different.

Then there’s the issue of imminence in self-defense—the threat had to be so imminent that you had to react with force. It’s often required that it be in that exact second, in hand-to-hand combat. But if it were hand-to-hand combat, women would usually die. She won’t be able to defend herself. So imminence looks different for women—and that’s rarely considered historically and legally.

HR: How is Tanisha’s story a prime example of criminalized survival?

JV: Tanisha was dealing with not having housing. She ended up meeting a guy at a club, and he had a room, and she didn’t want to sleep in a car, and she didn’t want to impose on friends. She ended up going and moving in with him. He wasn’t her boyfriend. He was just a roommate. But he abused her.

Quickly, he took over her life. She wanted to leave, but he also took over her finances, so she couldn’t leave very easily. So she decided she didn’t want to sleep in the car, so she would make it work while she stayed.

He then killed a man in their shared apartment. She was there at the time. She ran out. He put a gun to her head. He put a hand to her throat. And he basically told her to get with the program and do as he said—or he would kill her, as well.

She did as he said. She helped wrap the body of this young man that he had killed. Then she ran for years. She was really scared of him. She was scared of the police. Finally, her conscience got to her. She came forward to help solve this cold case and help the police so that his family would have closure.

HR: She’d had faith that the system would protect her. What actually happened?

JV: Alisa Bierria says something like, “Black women are used as pawns to demonstrate justice and then disposed of.” I certainly saw that. If we consider justice convictions—which I think prosecutors often do—these women are often used to testify.

Tanisha came forward—but she was promised immunity, according to her. She had a bad lawyer, and she didn’t get it. They needed to build their case. They said, to make her believable to a jury, she couldn’t have gotten any deal. They used her as a witness so that they could win their conviction. And so they threw her life away.

HR: Efforts such as New York’s Domestic Violence Survivors Justice Act address criminalized survival. What would it take to overhaul the system?

JV: Survivor justice laws provide openings for people who are in prison to get their cases heard. Oklahoma, Illinois, New Jersey—and, more recently, Georgia—have passed such laws. The laws allow for a person who can show that abuse was a significant contributing factor, for the judge to have discretion on sentencing. They’re also retroactive. So if you’re in prison, you can have a chance of getting your case heard again.

Those laws are really important, but I can’t sugarcoat it: It’s a systemic issue. It’s generational, it’s enslaved people who came before these women were born, and these ideas that people learned about these communities, what they’ve been through.

It’s clear that the narratives we’re told about people, and the labels that are put on them—by the criminal legal system, prisons, even media—have nothing to do with who they are, the real context of their lives, or what really happened.

Some really remarkable people are locked up on murder convictions. It’s changed how I understand being a woman in America. This is baked into our culture and society; it’s what we all experience on some level. This is all by design.

Three months after a New York Times investigation detailed allegations of sexual violence against United Farm Workers movement cofounder Cesar E. Chavez, many Latinos are still grappling with that question. The revelations have sparked difficult conversations about accountability, memory, and what it means when someone whose legacy is woven into a community’s identity is accused of causing profound harm.

To understand why the allegations have resonated so deeply, it helps to understand Chavez’s place in American history. In the 1960s and 1970s, farmworkers across California endured grueling conditions, including low wages, job insecurity, exposure to pesticides, and few legal protections.

Alongside labor organizer Dolores Huerta, Chavez helped build the United Farm Workers into one of the country’s most influential labor movements, organizing strikes, leading nationwide boycotts, and advocating for better pay and working conditions. Their efforts helped bring national attention to the exploitation of agricultural workers and secured contracts that improved conditions for thousands of laborers.

Over time, Chavez became more than a labor movement leader. For many Latinos, particularly Mexican Americans, he came to symbolize perseverance, dignity, and the fight for civil rights. Schools, parks, streets, and public buildings bear his name.

His story has long been taught as an example of nonviolent activism and collective action. His image has become inseparable from the broader history of Latino political empowerment in the United States.

That is why the New York Times investigation landed with such force. Drawing on interviews and historical records, the investigation reported allegations from multiple women who said Chavez sexually assaulted or abused them over several decades. It also examined claims that people within his circle were aware of the alleged misconduct but failed to intervene.

Although Chavez died in 1993 and was never criminally charged or able to respond to the allegations, the reporting challenged a public legacy that had largely portrayed him as a moral leader and champion of justice. For many who grew up revering Chavez, the investigation has forced an agonizing question: How should communities remember a figure whose contributions to social justice are now being weighed against allegations of profound personal harm?

Psychologists suggest that revelations involving admired leaders can trigger a unique form of emotional conflict. Psychologist Jennifer Freyd’s research on institutional betrayal suggests that when harm is committed by someone closely tied to a person’s identity, community, or sense of belonging, people may experience grief, confusion, anger, and disbelief simultaneously. The challenge is not only processing the wrongdoing itself, but reconciling it with long-held beliefs about a person or institution once trusted. In these moments, the person being questioned is not merely a public figure but someone connected to collective memory, cultural pride, and a community’s understanding of its own history.

That tension raises yet another difficult question: How can communities acknowledge painful truths without abandoning the movements and values that shaped them?

Holding two truths at once

For Pablo Gonzalez, a first-generation Chicano scholar-activist and anthropologist who studies social movements, the allegations against Chavez forced a conversation that could no longer be avoided.

“There’s no way you can’t have this conversation in a Chicano studies class,” Gonzalez said.

When he addressed the topic with students, he found himself overcome with emotion. As someone whose generation benefited from educational opportunities created through the broader farmworker and Chicano movements, he understood both the movement’s significance and the pain of confronting its contradictions.

“I got emotional because it’s something that for us, we have not yet been able to have deep conversations about,” Gonzalez said. “What the broader movement, that includes the Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers struggle, [meant]—of how deeply important it was but also how deeply painful it was in regards to its internal contradictions and conflicts.”

His response reflects a challenge many communities face when confronting harm committed by influential figures. The conversation is often framed as a choice between honoring a movement’s achievements and acknowledging abuse.

Alexandra Barahona de Brito, a scholar of collective memory and reconciliation, explains that societies are often better served by simplified narratives. Furthermore, research on transitional justice suggests communities build a more honest understanding of the past when they acknowledge both the accomplishments and failures of historical figures, rather than reducing them to heroes or villains.

Acknowledging one reality does not require denying the other. Instead, confronting both can create a fuller and more honest understanding of the past.

The cost of hero worship

According to Gonzalez, part of the difficulty lies in how social movements often become centered on individual figures.

Over time, Chavez’s role within the farmworker movement became inseparable from the movement itself. Through public fasts, religious symbolism, and widespread media attention, he became more than an organizer. He became a symbol.

“Over time, you create this persona,” Gonzalez said. “History starts to write about Cesar, and he becomes central to the story.” As Chavez’s image became increasingly intertwined with the farmworker movement, criticism of the leader could feel like criticism of the movement itself.

Psychologists use the term “halo effect” to describe the tendency for positive impressions in one area to shape perceptions of a person’s overall character. In Chavez’s case, admiration for his leadership and the movement’s achievements may have made it more difficult for supporters to reconcile evidence that conflicted with his public image.

That psychological tendency was reinforced by Chavez’s symbolic role within the movement.

He had become its most recognizable public face; questioning Chavez could also feel, for many, like questioning the legitimacy of the farmworker struggle itself. While charismatic leadership can inspire collective action, it can also make criticism of a leader feel like an attack on the cause they represent.

Gonzalez said that dynamic often led difficult conversations about Chavez to be sidelined.

“You don’t talk about, for instance, his anti-undocumented labor stance,” Gonzalez said. “You don’t talk about how he ostracized Filipino labor leaders or other farmworkers that didn’t agree with him.”

Instead, protecting the image of the movement’s most recognizable leader frequently took priority.

The recent allegations challenge communities to reconsider what happens when social movements become attached to a single individual rather than the thousands of people who collectively made change possible.

What survivors make possible

At the center of the current conversation are the women who came forward to share their experiences.

For Gonzalez, their decision to speak publicly represents more than a need to reassess Chavez’s legacy. It offers an opportunity to address forms of harm that have long remained unspoken within Latino communities.

“It takes time for those voices that were silenced and suppressed to come out,” Gonzalez said. “But they’re there. They’re always there.”

Psychiatrist Judith Herman’s research on trauma and recovery suggests that healing often begins when survivors are able to speak about their experiences and have those experiences acknowledged. Naming harm does not weaken communities. Instead, creating conditions where survivors feel safe enough to come forward and be taken seriously can become an important first step toward accountability and repair.

Gonzalez pointed to Dolores Huerta’s willingness to publicly address the allegations as an example of breaking longstanding silence.

“When young girls— . . . girls of color—are looking for heroes and heroines and they look at Dolores Huerta, they’re not only going to see a labor leader and civil rights leader, but also a person who broke the silence,” he said.

“They’re going to see other women, whose names probably won’t be written in history books, break the silence.”

Creating space for difficult conversations

The revelations surrounding Chavez arrive at a moment when conversations about sexual violence are unfolding across many institutions, from universities and workplaces to religious organizations and immigrant detention centers.

For Gonzalez, the importance of this moment extends far beyond one individual.

“Breaking the silence around that is important,” he said. “It could be the place where we see mobilization. Sexual violence in detention centers. Sexual violence against young girls. Everything that, again, our community has not had a meaningful dialogue about.”

That dialogue, he argues, must begin by centering survivors rather than protecting legacies.

“There has to be a dialogue in our community around sexual violence,” Gonzalez said. “There has to be a dialogue around centering victims.”

Restorative justice scholars argue that accountability begins not with protecting reputations but with understanding harm. Rather than asking how a leader’s legacy should be preserved, restorative approaches encourage communities to ask who was harmed, what support survivors need, and what changes are necessary to prevent similar abuses in the future.

Beyond heroes

As communities continue to wrestle with Chavez’s legacy, Gonzalez believes the broader lesson is not simply about one leader but about how we define leadership itself.

“The solution here is not to create more pedestals,” he said.

While some have proposed replacing Chavez’s name with other figures, Gonzalez argues that doing so risks repeating the same pattern. Instead, he believes communities should shift their attention away from singular heroes and toward the countless individuals whose labor, courage, and sacrifices sustain social movements.

“We have to embrace the nameless—not the voiceless, but the nameless—people who make up everyday struggles, because that’s who we are.”

The challenge facing Latino communities today is not deciding whether Chavez was entirely good or entirely bad. It is learning how to tell a fuller story—one that honors collective achievements, acknowledges harm, centers survivors, and resists the temptation to place any individual beyond accountability.

Perhaps that is what collective healing ultimately requires: not the erasure of history, but the courage to face it honestly.

In the aftermath of this ghastly genocide, the country needed to figure out how to move forward. Concerned about renewed violence, the newly formed government created a justice and reconciliation process to ensure that all Rwandans live side by side peacefully. This would be achieved by establishing “Reconciliation Villages.”

One of the villages, Rweru Reconciliation Village, serves as a case study in post-genocide reconstruction. In the village live both survivors and perpetrators of the genocide, there to demonstrate that living side by side is possible. All the residents participate in joint activities, such as farming the land and building homes together, attending communal gatherings, and reconstructing the social fabric.

As we’ll see, forgiveness in Rwanda is not without its challenges. Forgiveness takes time and can be a profound personal journey, shaped by cultural, religious, and spiritual beliefs. But for those who live in Rweru, forgiveness is seen not as condoning past atrocities, but as breaking free from the cycle of violence and hatred. We believe Rwanda shows the world that, even in the face of unspeakable horrors, communities can come together, forgive, and rebuild.

It is one thing to forgive someone who has offended you. It is a different story when faced with the task of making peace between groups that have committed violence against each other. What does forgiveness look like in a situation like this, and can forgiveness initiate societal change? Through our work at the Forgiveness Project at Stanford University, we’ve come to see Rwanda as a model of political forgiveness—a concept that is essential to building a more peaceful world.

What is political forgiveness?

In her book The Human Condition, the political philosopher Hannah Arendt writes, “Without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would be confined to a single deed.”

The beauty of forgiveness, as noted by Arendt, is that forgiveness interrupts otherwise automatic processes—not only in our private lives but also in the public sphere. Forgiveness is as vital in the public realm as it is to preserve bonds between individuals.

Psychologists describe forgiveness as a conscious choice to set aside feelings of anger and resentment toward an individual who has caused harm, regardless of whether that person deserves it. Although there is some disagreement about whether forgiveness requires developing positive feelings toward the offender, there is agreement that forgiveness is a process of letting go of deeply held anger or resentment.

In recent decades, psychologists have empirically validated several methodologies that promote forgiveness toward self and others, one of which is the Stanford Forgiveness Project. Research on the impact of psychoeducation on forgiveness has shown that it helps people forgive those who they feel have wronged them, forgive themselves, and enable existential forgiveness. These approaches, which we believe have been validated across a wide range of human offenses, offer promise in helping to resolve political and civil violence.     

Our goal is to integrate the secular model of forgiveness developed by the Stanford Forgiveness Project with a tested dialogue method from Colombia, South America, to create a testable process we are labeling “political forgiveness.” We believe the essence of political forgiveness integrates interpersonal and self-forgiveness with structured dialogue to help enable communities to recover from violence and civil unrest.

Political forgiveness can be defined as the process of repairing fractured relationships among individuals, nations, or groups. The goal of political forgiveness is to heal individuals, reconstruct communal relationships, and rebuild trust. Political forgiveness emerges from the enfolding of appropriate grieving of wounds, forgiving of self and others, and creating positive dialogue. Forgiveness by and for individuals and groups is a powerful mechanism for healing harmful actions that cannot be reversed.   

Forgiveness in Rweru

What does political forgiveness look like?

Let’s return to the example of Rwanda and the Rweru Reconciliation Village. Two of its residents are Maria Izagiriza, a survivor, and Philbert Nterzirizaza, a former perpetrator and Izagiriza’s neighbor, who killed some of her family members. Izagiriza’s husband and six of her nine children were murdered during the genocide.

Right after the downing of the plane that killed the president, Izagiriza had been warned that there was trouble ahead. Her neighbor said to Izagiriza that her people were responsible for the leader’s death, and she would pay dearly for what she had done.

The following morning, the militia showed up at her home, killed all her livestock, burned her house down, and beat her husband nearly to death. Fortunately, her children were left unharmed. Izagiriza hid until nightfall when she felt that it was safe enough to return to her compound to get her husband and children. When she finally found them, she described what she witnessed: “Though breathing, my husband was so badly wounded and bleeding from all parts of his body,” she says, pausing to wipe the tears streaming down her tired face. “The children were scared stiff but unharmed.”

With the help of her children, Izagiriza somehow managed to drag her injured husband to a hiding place where she felt they would all be safe. This is when she realized that the person she thought was a friend and who offered to help, instead delivered her husband and children to the killers. Again, she managed to escape, but this time, with her four-month-old baby strapped to her back. No one else made it. “That was the last time I saw my family alive.”

Izagiriza ended up at a barricade where a group of young men stopped and killed people. Among them was her neighbor, 18-year-old Ntezirizaza, who was motivated by his own hate and, with disregard for human life, was responsible for killing some of her family members.

“In 1994, I was a teenager, my body full of youthful vigor and my mind filled with a terrible ideology, fed to me since I was in elementary school. . . . Our mindset at that time was more lethal than the machetes we carried.” Ntezirizaza paused, then, with a low voice and distant gaze, said: “We hacked her husband and eldest son to death and threw the remaining two children in a deep pit, alive. We knew they wouldn’t survive.”

Ntezirizaza, who spent time in prison after the genocide, carries the burden of shame and guilt for what he had done. Like others who committed acts of violence, he wanted to make amends through Rwanda’s reconciliation process. Ntezirizaza was afraid to face Izagiriza. He understood that asking for forgiveness was necessary if both were to move forward. He also recognized that he could not just ask for forgiveness to absolve his guilt; he was asking for forgiveness to help them both move on to restore their community.

Izagiriza understandably struggled with forgiving the man who killed her loved ones. Yet, over time, through the village’s reconciliation program, Izagiriza came to understand what had happened and why Ntezirizaza had been indoctrinated to hate. Her experience of forgiveness brought her peace and speaks to her survival and recovery.

“When one’s heart is burdened, you don’t see anything good at all,” she told Vice Magazine. “But when you forgive from your heart, you see many good things coming your way. And forgiveness is an important thing, as it makes your heart relieved and you gain new ideas of self-development, and life continues as normal.”

For his part, Ntezirizaza came to understand the gravity of his actions and, in so doing, was able to ask for forgiveness. “After getting released from jail, I would feel guilty that I committed crimes against Maria, and I would feel fearful and ashamed of myself. . . . I asked her to forgive me. She forgave me, and I felt relief in my heart.”

Izagiriza and Ntezirizaza are now working together in the village fields, helping to grow food to sustain their community.

Turning experiments into examples

Political forgiveness begins with people from all warring sides agreeing to come together and work with one another. Our method involves meeting separately with two groups who have been in conflict in order to teach the basic skills of forgiveness and discover how the process of forgiveness has inspired people in similar situations. The goal is to come to a common understanding of what forgiveness is and is not.

The process we’re currently testing is based on work done in Colombia, which saw decades of violence between the government, militia groups, and crime syndicates. After many attempts to stop the violence, in 2012 President Juan Manuel Santos was able to begin peace talks in Havana, Cuba. One of the outcomes of the talks was the creation of the “Commission for the Clarification of Truth, Co-existence and Non-repetition” (CEV) focused on victims and their right to the truth.

The CEV promotes the idea of co-existence, which was achieved by creating safe spaces for dialogue between the deeply divided sectors of Colombian society. Rather than treating the “truth” as a series of facts, Father Leonel Narváez developed a process called “logics of truth” to facilitate emotional healing. Inspired by political forgiveness models, this framework acknowledges that there are different layers that make up what we call “truth.”

This process helped de-escalate hostilities by having participants explicitly separate events, which are objective, from the meaning ascribed to them. This dialogue framework helps participants grasp the complex, multifaceted nature of truth. The dialogue process begins with each side discussing what happened as they see it, why it happened, and its significance. Then they discuss how to move forward from what happened, including the painful consequences and intense feelings. Finally, the dialogue broadens to discuss how the group can work toward societal reconciliation to help prevent violence from erupting again.

We are now testing this model with Palestinians and Israelis based in the United States who are struggling to make peace with each other. In our work as researchers and practitioners, we understand that forgiveness is both a decision and an ongoing process. We have each worked with suffering people whose suffering only abates when they can forgive. We try to never lose sight of the fact that forgiveness is a choice, something that can be taught and practiced.

Though that phrasing could be interpreted broadly, the full statement makes clear that the government agency is not worried about Father Knows Best reruns getting labeled “TV-G,” but rather is questioning “shows with transgender and gender non-binary programming” that are being rated “appropriate for children.” Supporters of the effort have cited programs like Disney Jr.’s Firebuds, a cartoon where talking cars exist alongside a human character who is nonbinary, as cause for concern. The implication of this public inquiry is that such programs are potentially inappropriate.

The FCC, led by Brendan Carr, is not-so-subtly extending the Trump administration’s years-long targeting of gender-expansive communities, which has included fearmongering around trans people in bathrooms and limiting access to gender-affirming care. In its announcement about this effort, the agency vaguely asks if “gender identity themes” should be explicitly named on TV in the future and if any mention might inherently warrant a stricter rating. (Programs with crude language, violence, and sexual situations currently receive additional scrutiny and warning labels.)

Yet research suggests that while it might be useful to call out the inclusion of transgender and nonbinary characters for parents, it is largely for the opposite reasons. Rather than this being universally problematic, studies have found a myriad of benefits to consuming media sensitive to the lives of gender-expansive people.

The benefits of expanded gender representation

Layered representations on TV that expose kids to people and experiences they may not see or have access to otherwise are an opportunity for transformative education and community building. Meanwhile, there are real risks to continuing to use a narrow, binary framework to limit how children learn about gender, sex, and sexuality.

In a 2019 article published in the journal of Communication, Culture & Critique, researchers looking at the impact of gender-diverse representation concluded that, at the very least, “media is one discourse that reflects and creates reality.” So for children who are just starting to define their own identities, seeing a variety of experiences on screen could be crucial to discovering and affirming who they are.

This is why programs like Steven Universe, one of the shows flagged by supporters of the FCC inquiry for intentionally “targeting” kids with its “LGBT characters,” have actually been used to teach social and emotional skills in classrooms. The cartoon follows a boy named Steven and his adventures with intergalactic beings known as the Crystal Gems. Researchers have highlighted its disruption of gender norms, discussion of mental health, and expansive representation of queer relationships in order to argue that Steven Universe can improve skills like decision making and building relationships.

This view of the show has been affirmed by kids themselves, with one teenager reflecting to Teen Vogue that “seeing characters you look up to be flawed individuals and love each other despite that is refreshing, and as a young viewer—I started in middle school—those lessons stick with you.”

Meanwhile, when depictions of trans, queer, or nonbinary people are lacking, or stereotypical, researchers find it can give “license to hegemonically inclined parents to stamp out gender-deviant behaviors in their children.” (Hegemony is defined by the researchers as “the willing submission” to the behavioral rules determined by the “dominant group”). And queer children who are not supported by their parents are more likely to be depressed and experience “higher levels of parental abuse.” Based on interviews and surveys, the 2019 study of gender-diverse representation found that narrow depictions on TV are limiting “understandings of what it means to identify as TGD [transgender and gender-diverse] in the world.” Narratives that focus exclusively on gender-binary, white, upper-middle class, and “post-operative heterosexual” characters may even be exacerbating well-documented health risks for queer kids, which include 1 in 3 “TGD” people experiencing assault during primary school.

In addition to changing how we view ourselves, media can be used to increase positive attitudes toward others. A direct, realistic story is among the most effective means of teaching children (and adults) about the existence of transgender identities and challenging “gender essentialism” (or the idea that biology determines gender).

For example, in a 2021 study, participants improved how they viewed transgender people and those living beyond the binary after watching a single 1992 episode of Star Trek: Next Generation, titled “The Outcast,” which features a main character, Riker, starting a romantic relationship with J’naii, a character from a society without gender. The researchers selected the episode because they felt it represented “an atmosphere where a gender diverse individual is not discriminated against or seen as an abnormality” (though it is perhaps more complicated than that, since it turns out J’naii actually wants to identify with a binary gender and is subsequently persecuted by their own community in the show). By increasing familiarity and empathy, they concluded, media interventions like this might contribute to decreased discrimination and violence against trans people.

Going deeper than representation

It’s worth noting, though, that in that same Star Trek study, the researchers did not find that changed attitudes guaranteed changed behavior, nor that a decrease in transphobia necessarily indicated a willingness to support civil rights for trans and gender-nonconforming people. This actually tracks with “The Outcast,” which does not end with Riker and his coworkers necessarily overhauling how the gender binary operates onboard their ship, despite any lessons they’ve learned from J’naii.

It’s clear that representation alone does not move the needle and can—if the portrayals are not varied, expansive, and accurate—even increase harm. Another study found that “the rise of visibility in the media of trans people has coincided with more public scrutiny” and in some cases made life harder for those navigating a society that was already structured to discriminate against them. This is echoed by the research on the impact of stereotypical media representations of Black children, which can distort self-perception and be a factor in racially motivated bullying. Depictions in children’s media are particularly notorious for the “adultification” of Black girls, which can also contribute to less care, greater surveillance, discipline at school, and more sexual violence.

In fact, racist and sexist representations have been part of children’s TV for a long time, and these depictions have not always been incorporated into parental ratings. A 2021 New York Times editorial criticized Looney Tunes for perpetuating “rape culture” via its Pepe Le Pew character, after which Warner Brothers announced that they would no longer produce new episodes featuring the lecherous skunk, who is often seen stalking and giving non-consensual kisses to Penelope Pussycat. Yet older episodes with the character, which clearly include overt messaging on “gender identity,” are widely available and are still deemed appropriate for kids today.

Other characters from Looney Tunes like Bugs Bunny also have clear roots in white supremacist minstrel shows, but this fact is not flagged for parents in the current ratings system either (which gives some episodes a TV-Y7 rating, meaning it’s suitable for children ages seven and older). Even the aforementioned Steven Universe, created by Rebecca Sugar, has faced criticism over its depiction of Black-coded characters that may lean too far into stereotypes.

On the flip side, shows created by and for the people they represent are more likely to lead to authentic content that resonates with those communities. For example, a 2024 study found that series “with at least one Native writer, director, and/or executive producer” were rated more favorably by audiences than those without. Similarly, Disney and Marvel’s Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur—whose protagonist is a Black girl named Lunella Lafayette—had a writer’s room and directing team featuring many women of color and has been subsequently praised for its treatment of Black queer girls. (Even so, an episode from season two of the show, centered on a Black transgender girl named Brooklyn who wants to join a volleyball team, was pulled in 2024 before it ever aired due to a stated desire to be “respectful of the role parents play in making choices for their children”).

Regardless of how you look at it, it’s hard to find any evidence that kids who are exposed to holistic, layered representations of gender diversity are harmed by the encounter. As the studies discussed suggest, even if a TV show like Star Trek might challenge how a viewer thinks about gender, it doesn’t mean that it will change anything about how they behave.

Instead, such media have the capacity for opening up conversations that are otherwise not happening at home. A 2025 study found that parents are still more likely to use gender-neutral language like “kid” to describe children and characters in books whom they see as “boys” or “men,” as compared to those whom they see as “girls” or “women,” implying that the “default” person is still largely thought to be a man. This socialization is enforced by a children’s TV landscape where, according to the Geena Davis Media Institute, “male characters” outnumber “female” characters by 22.6% and are “significantly more likely” to be white. Leaving things this biased should be more concerning than a few characters on Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur talking about being trans.

A majority of parents agree that social identity impacts their children’s success in life, yet more than 60% of them are not discussing race, ethnicity, or social class with their kids. Repeated studies find that children’s media can reduce prejudice and increase self-confidence if what’s being shown is inclusive and thoughtfully engaged with. That last part—whether or not parents take the opportunity to intentionally engage the media being consumed and want to imagine possibilities with their kids—is not something a TV show can determine.

But it seems clear that parents and educators materially benefit, regardless of how they approach children’s learning, from more, not less, expansive representations of gender, sex, sexuality, race, ability, and class in media made for kids. Though the FCC’s call for comments on TV ratings does not mention all these other aspects of identity, there is significant overlap between how these factors are, or are not, represented on screen. Given that the industry is still largely controlled by wealthy white cisgender men, the restrictions or isolation of shows that challenge the dominant order in one way can easily have a cascading, silencing effect on efforts to challenge the dominant order in other ways.

The few shows being questioned by the FCC today are no more prescriptive around gender than the binary messaging of Father Knows Best and Looney Tunes. Promoting even more multifaceted representation of and by gender-diverse people of color on TV can provide a necessary counterbalance to the historical and sustained ubiquity of stories that normalize white patriarchal rule.

I think about that gap often. The distance between the announcement of freedom and the experience of it. The way something can be technically true and still take years, generations, to land in the body—if ever.

And I think about what freedom, maliciously delayed, would have even meant to the newly self-possessed. Were they reaching for relief from the daily indignities, the particular violence of a system designed to extract everything and return nothing? Or did they believe it would mean something structural—the dismantling of the system itself? Slavery was technically over, but the system was not dismantled. Which means what was on offer in 1865 was not liberation. It was, at best, a temporary and conditional relief expected to be received as grace.

This pattern repeated itself in the generations that followed. The right to order one’s own steps, to live where you chose, to build in a neighborhood that would hold what you built—blocked at every turn. The freedom to move, which had always been a precondition for everything else, was managed, restricted, and re-administered through new instruments every time the old ones were formally prohibited.

In his 1945 autobiography Black Boy, Richard Wright wrote of leaving Mississippi years earlier: “I was leaving the South to fling myself into the unknown . . . to see if it could grow differently, if it could drink of new and cool rains, bend in strange winds, respond to the warmth of other suns and, perhaps, to bloom.” Isabel Wilkerson built her landmark book, The Warmth of Other Suns, around that line, as she documented the 6 million Black Americans who left the South between 1915 and 1970 in search of dignity.

When I left the United States for Spain in 2017, this, too, was an exercise in freedom of movement. I called it a break. I was burned out in the particular way that Black women in the U.S. get burned out—from the sustained physiological cost of living in a country that registers your presence as a problem to be constantly surveilled and managed. A bone-deep fatigue that rest did not ease, that did not belong entirely to me. It had been passed down.

There’s a name for this condition: “weathering.” Coined by public health researcher Arline T. Geronimus, who has spent four decades documenting its effects in Black Americans, weathering describes the way chronic exposure to racial stress accelerates biological aging, wearing down the body itself. By midlife, more than half of Black women show signs of advanced biological aging that cannot be explained by socioeconomic status alone. The problem, Geronimus argues, is not how well we take care of ourselves. It is how well society takes care of us. There is no current evidence that weathering stops, let alone reverses, on departure. What I felt abroad was real. It just did not happen on the tarmac.

But weathering is not the whole story. Corey Keyes, a psychologist at Emory University, identified a striking paradox: Black Americans report higher rates of flourishing than white Americans by clinical measures, even while carrying greater exposure to discrimination, stress, and physical illness. When Keyes controlled for perceived discrimination, the Black advantage in flourishing increased across nearly every measure, meaning Black Americans would be even healthier were it not for discrimination.

What the data registers as resilience is simultaneously evidence of what is being endured. To read it as proof that Black people can take more, that what has been suffered is not that bad, is to misread the data in a way that has consequences. It converts structural injury into individual strength and lets the structure off the hook. There is no current clinical evidence that weathering reverses on departure.

Three years after I had landed in Spain, still trying to understand what I had moved toward, what I had moved away from, and whether those were the same question, I launched my podcast and archive, Flourish in the Foreign. This happened on May 11, 2020, two weeks before the world watched George Floyd die on a Minneapolis street. My project became an award-winning, internationally acclaimed life-history archive documenting Black women living abroad, building narratives that mainstream media preferred to flatten.

Merriam-Webster defines flourishing as growing luxuriantly, achieving success, and being in a state of active production. That is the flourishing I named this archive after. Not a diagnostic threshold, but a felt life; the gap between those two definitions is where this essay lives. What the guests on my podcast describe—the body stopping its bracing, the jaw unclenching—gestures toward something the research has not yet followed them far enough to name. Flourish in the Foreign exists because I understood, from my own body, that the research could document the toll but could not capture the texture of what women were actually navigating—the calculations, the grief, the unexpected discoveries, the slow interior work that no wellness program had prepared them for.

Over six years, I have conducted more than 150 life-history interviews with Black women living across 30 countries. Through my recent “Aging Abroad” podcast series, I have begun revisiting many of these women years later, creating a rare longitudinal record that documents not only why Black women leave but how their understanding of wellness, belonging, and freedom evolves over time. The question Richard Wright asked—can the transplanted person grow differently, can they bloom?—is the same question running beneath every interview in my archive.

What this project has taught me, consistently and without exception, is this: Relief is real. And relief is not the same thing as freedom. Confusing the two has costs.

What does liberation require?

Niana was my first podcast guest. I had known her since we were both language assistants in northern Spain. She’s from Chicago, a city that received hundreds of thousands of Black Americans during the Great Migration, and whose children will likely never know the city the way she does because they are being raised in the Netherlands.

That, too, is what movement does across generations, disrupts identities and connections to place. I recorded our conversation in February 2020, 18 months after she had left Spain to follow her Dutch husband to the Netherlands, and months before the podcast publicly existed. She was still Spain-shaped, still grieving it from the flatness of the Netherlands.

Six years later, when she returned for the “Aging Abroad” episode at 42, she named what Spain had actually given her: “When I went to Spain, I felt free. I felt like someone had lifted something off my chest. But what came with that—it was just myself and my internal voice . . . it was super clear. It was super loud. It couldn’t be hidden by interactions with other people or distractions.” Spain is not devoid of anti-Blackness. But what it offered her was the specific removal of enough noise that the voice waiting underneath got loud enough to hear.

She also named what she had had to reckon with in that quiet—the guilt of the American differential, the specific social transaction of announcing her nationality and watching rooms shift in her favor in ways she knew were not available to the Black Spanish and Afro-European women around her.

“I felt a lot of guilt there because I knew that I had to say I was American,” she said. “I would immediately be treated differently and I would have access to things that this person who’s born here who deserves it will never have access to.” That observation, made 18 months out of Spain, was not yet theory. It was a pattern she had watched play out for five years and had not yet found clean language for. The essay you are reading is still looking for that language.

What began as a personal experiment became a sustained interrogation of what wellness actually means in the context of voluntary migration and whether what Black American women are calling freedom is what they are actually reaching for, let alone experiencing. The question moves through a historical thread: from Juneteenth, where freedom was declared but had not yet arrived in the body, to the Great Migration, where Black Americans moved North and West toward dignity and found a different version of the same constraint, to the present idea of Blaxit (Black Exit), a growing social and political movement of Black Americans away from the United States—and beyond.

The movement is global, but the question underneath is the same: What does liberation actually require, and is that what is being sought, or simply the next iteration of conditional relief? To name that distinction is the beginning of honest accounting.

Migration as liberation

Courtney grew up in a sundown town in Michigan. Her family integrated the neighborhood in 1988; her father, a police officer in a neighboring city, was stopped and harassed by local police every night driving home through the neighborhood where he owned property, because they did not believe a Black man belonged there, regardless of the badge he carried. Her mother had moved north from Mississippi following siblings who had already gone in earlier surges of the Great Migration.

“I consider myself a product of it,” Courtney told me on the podcast. She carried that lineage before she ever boarded a plane.

She built a life in Atlanta. In the first six months after she and her husband moved into a townhome there—one of the only Black families in the neighborhood—they had police called on them twice: once because a moving truck briefly blocked a cul-de-sac, once because a neighbor heard music and called rather than knock. The year before she left the United States, her closest friend died by suicide. Same age. In her wedding. Had just earned her Ph.D.

“Looking at my friend in a casket, somebody that just like looks like me and like is in the same life stage as me, really did something. It broke me open, quite honestly.” She flew to Mexico on May 1, 2021. She cried before the plane doors opened, tears streaming into her mask before they had even disembarked. Mexico is not devoid of anti-Blackness. What it offered her was the specific removal of the specific instruments that had been administering harm to her entire life.

“Migration as liberation,” she told me, “is a newer, modern way for us to reclaim our freedom.” She named the lineage she was placing herself inside: Josephine Baker in France, James Baldwin in Paris, Assata Shakur in Cuba—people who left not always because the world was offering them better, but because survival required departure. She named her mother’s Mississippi-to-Michigan journey as the movement she descended from. The wager she was making in Mexico was the same wager, updated for a different century and a global map.

I believe this. I also believe that liberation requires something that relief does not.

Relief is a change in conditions—the body stopping its bracing, the jaw unclenching, something long-held beginning to release. It is real and substantive.

Liberation is a change in structure—internal, relational, and political. It requires self-awareness about the construct you are leaving. A commitment not to rebuild it somewhere else. The willingness to be in genuine relationship with the place and people you have arrived among. To bring your gifts rather than your hunger.

Becoming, and the long work

Sienna came to Spain for the first time as a study abroad student from Vassar for five months, extended by a month on her own money, long enough that she wrote her senior thesis on the misrepresentation of Afro-Latina and Caribbean women there.

She went back to Brooklyn after graduation, worked a good job, and was unhappy in a way she couldn’t fully name. The freedom she had found in Spain had no equivalent in her daily life. She applied to the government language assistant program, got placed in Murcia, and moved permanently. That was 12 years ago. She had been building toward Spain deliberately, which makes what happened next the more instructive.

She still had her hair fall out at 24. As she said on my podcast, “That was almost like a culmination of all of the years of not living in alignment that had kind of manifested itself through my body.”

She had come home from the beach one afternoon and begun taking out her braids. Clumps in the shower. A month of doctors offering no answers. The geography had changed, and she had chosen it with intention and intellectual preparation. The survival mode had not. What Spain offered was the specific removal of enough noise that the interior work became impossible to avoid.

“Where you are does not matter if you do not do the work to heal, to become who you truly want to be.”

Twelve years later: VP of growth at a talent and recruiting platform, a successful brand, Las Morenas de España, built and left on her own terms. A village of 700 people in Valencia. A partner. Chickens. A garden. Not the relief of arrival. The consequence of work.

Khephra came to Spain in 2013, before this was a movement, before it had a name, before anyone was using the word Blaxit. A New Orleans woman who had grown up bold and uninhibited arrived in Madrid and had to learn, for the first time, to have some inhibitions. She came because she wanted to, a desire that required no political rationale.

“I just left because I wanted to. I’ve always wanted the chance to leave.” She went natural, organized, started the first protest after Michael Brown’s murder with seven friends and a permit for 1,200 people—4,000 came. She does not fully belong in Spain. When she goes home to New Orleans or Atlanta, she does not fully belong there either. She has made peace with a diasporic home rather than a national one, a self assembled from chosen belonging rather than inherited geography.

“I’ve grown so much and, yes, I’ve been through so much, but I’ve also learned, don’t die. That’s the best we can do. That is liberating.”

That sentence is not ironic. It is this essay’s argument at its most earned and unsentimental—not the liberation of the golden hour, not the liberation of the terrace in Lisbon, but the liberation of a woman in her mid-40s who has been at this for over a decade and has found the courage to be disliked, to occupy her own full complexity, to stop managing other people’s comfort. She suspects her picture lines the finest bird cages and litter boxes in Spain. She is fine with that, as long as they got her good side.

Freedom is something to live

Ayoka B., a writer and poet from Washington, D.C., was a featured guest on the podcast in March of this year. She discussed leaving America for Costa Rica, and also was guest essayist on my Substack, Letters From Elsewhere, in May 2026. She wrote about the evolution of her motherhood abroad in the weeks before her son—raised in Costa Rica from 13, fluent in Spanish, thriving in ways she could not have engineered for him at home—flew back to D.C. against her wishes.

She described her departure from the U.S.: “I felt like I was fleeing for my life because I was.”

Her son rode his bike to school, an 11-minute ride he navigated alone, something he could never have done in D.C. He earned As and Bs. He played basketball on weekends and hung out at the beach. He moved through a community that evaluated him on what he contributed rather than managed him for what he might threaten. “My son could move around alone and with his friends, unbothered,” she said.

And then someone suggested he return to the States after graduation. He agreed. He had grown up in the freedom she made and did not know what made it necessary. He did not grow up in the D.C. that she survived.

“Now, he wants to return to the United States, against my wishes, at the worst possible time.” She named what he would be returning to: ICE raids, ballooning unemployment, police violence. She named what he did not understand: that there is a difference between visiting D.C. and living there, that he doesn’t know how to move in it, that his disposition—open and trusting, easygoing, earned on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica—could make him a mark. “My son, who has always had his own room, will be sharing a house with four people and sleeping on the couch.”

He flew to D.C. on May 28. She is currently filing paperwork for Costa Rican citizenship, hoping more options will lure him back. “I am terrified. I’m not as emotional as before, but I’m not OK.”

Crossing the gap

That is this essay’s most difficult truth: Relief can be built, inhabited, handed to a child, and returned. The freedom Ayoka made is real. Her son’s choice to leave it is also real. He never had to experience what made it necessary. He does not know what she survived. He doesn’t yet know what she knows.

On Juneteenth, we celebrate the day the news arrived. But what Juneteenth also documents is that freedom can be declared and not yet lived. There is always a gap—sometimes measured in years, sometimes in the distance between a mother in Costa Rica filing citizenship paperwork and a son on a plane to D.C.—between the moment liberation is made possible and the moment it is actually inhabited.

I am nine years into crossing that gap. The women in this archive are years and decades into it.

Niana, at 42 in a Dutch village, craving Lake Shore Drive, told me: “I can also say what might heal me may not be where I’m from, but I’m proud of that.” She holds both truths without resolving them. She has been holding them for 13 years.

We are not running away. We are running toward something that was never available where we started. The thing we are running toward is not a specific country. It is an experience of self-determination. It is an opportunity to cultivate a life well-lived, on our own terms.

Richard Wright asked whether the transplanted person could grow differently. Whether they could respond to the warmth of other suns. Whether they could, perhaps, bloom.

The women in this archive are the answer. Not because they have arrived. But because they are still growing.

• A Short History of Black Happiness: What can African American history tell us about the cultivation of well-being?
• How Well Do Happiness Practices Serve Black Communities?: We interviewed Black people about where happiness comes from and whether 15 typical happiness practices work for them.
• On Juneteenth, Black Women Reflect on Seeking Freedom Outside the U.S.: Black Americans can find relief when they leave the United States to live abroad—but do they find liberation?
• Why Telling Our Own Story Is So Powerful for Black Americans: Andrea Collier reflects on the role of storytelling in black American history—and in her own life.
• Why Storytelling Skills Matter for African-American Kids: For black students, storytelling skills directly predict their early reading skills.
• Can Loving Yourself and Others Protect Your Health?: Research suggests that seeing our spiritual connections to others could protect us from disease and promote public health.

Emancipation Day celebration in Richmond, Virginia, 1905. Source: Wikipedia

• How to Change the Story about Students of Color: Dena Simmons explores how educators can inadvertently harm students of color—and what we can do to bring out their best.
• Why Marginalized Students Need Hope to Succeed: Researcher Dante Dixson is developing programs to help disadvantaged students envision a brighter future for themselves.
• Can We Teach Racial Justice by Talking About Virtues?: It’s harder to talk about diversity, equity, and inclusion in schools these days, but there might be other ways to frame the conversation.
• How Talking About Race Can Bring Black Families Together: A new program is helping Black children and their caregivers talk about race—and they’re learning important lessons about racial socialization.
• For Black Children, Play Can Be Transformative: Play is a radical and liberatory activity for Black children. As adults, we have a responsibility to promote and participate in it, too.
• Does Preventing Depression Look Different for Black and White Kids?: New research suggests that ways of supporting mental health in white youth may not work for underrepresented groups, such as Black youth.
• Nine Picture Books That Illuminate Black Joy: These books celebrate Black children’s everyday lives—being bold, curious, creative, loving, and playful.
• How Adults Can Support the Mental Health of Black Children: Psychologist Riana Elyse Anderson explains how families can communicate about race and cope with racial stress and trauma.
• How Can I Stay Positive for My Kids When I’m So Overwhelmed?: Even for a psychologist who studies how kids understand racism and violence, talking to her own children about it is difficult.
• How the “Strong Black Woman” Identity Both Helps and Hurts: Being a “superwoman” could help African American women cope with racial discrimination—but it may have some drawbacks.
• Seven Complicated Lessons From Jamaica About Happiness: What does the island reveal about the science of happiness?
• From Othering to Belonging: In a Science of Happiness podcast, we explore racial justice, well-being, and widening our circles of connection and concern.
• When Diversity Is Stressful, Focus on Building Trust: We talk with Claude M. Steele about his new book, Churn: The Tension That Divides Us and How to Overcome It.
• Thoughts on Awkward Relationships and Bridging Divides: In a Science of Happiness podcast, comedian W. Kamau Bell discusses the challenges of finding common ground, even with people in your own family.
• Why George Floyd Still Matters: Five years ago, the police killing of George Floyd provoked a wave of change. As those gains come under attack, Stephanie Griffith finds hope in human moments.
• Can We Build a World Where We All Belong?: john a. powell explains why we distance ourselves from groups of people and how we can all find the connection that we crave.

We also have resource pages devoted to anti-racist tools and to the scientific case for diversity.

One group drops seafaring formalities and coalesces around collective survival. They tend to each other, work together, and split what they have. Each person’s subsistence is tied to the other’s.

The other crew maintain their maritime hierarchy, compete for power and status, hoard resources—and ultimately turn on each other.

Everyone from the first crew survives. Most from the second group die from various ailments and unfortunate incidents, including cannibalism. 

That’s a scenario based on real historical examples that is sketched by John Cacioppo, Harry Reis, and Alex Zautra in their 2011 paper entitled “Social Resilience.” In this article, the authors explain their approach to developing a training program for U.S. Army personnel meant to help them function better in teams.

The premise? Human survival depends on being able to turn toward each other under difficult circumstances and join forces to identify, avoid, or address challenges and catastrophes. Our ability to coordinate effort in response to shared threats is an evolutionary mandate for ultrasocial creatures like humans. Born helpless and lacking physically dominant features like giant apex predator teeth, the authors write, “Our remarkable accomplishments as a species are attributable to our collective action, not our individual might.”

Stephanie Brown of the Stony Brook Neuroscience Institute attributes this collaborative sensibility to “fitness interdependence”: my survival depends on yours, theirs, and, to some degree, ultimately, everyone’s. Because the harm from some threats to survival and reproduction is distributed to everyone (like crop dusting to cull agricultural pests), our human nervous system is sensitive to others’ vulnerability, and so driven to protect the group from shared threat.

The biological and psychological processes underlying these features include being able to synchronize our bodies and behaviors (e.g., empathy), feeling innately compelled to share joy and relieve each other’s pain (e.g., social capitalizing, compassion), and celebrating heroic virtues like helping one another and working to make the world a better place. Serving each other’s welfare through caregiving, protection from harm, and relief of suffering, it turns out, is fundamentally rewarding and healthy. Many studies have reported activation in the brain’s reward pathways that signal pleasure after behaving generously—the “warm glow.” People who spend more hours volunteering experience less disease and live longer, for example. Like any other ability, prosocial and altruistic tendencies are also shaped over the course of life by culture and context, both of which can increase or suppress how prominently they show up within any given person, society, or period of time.

According to Cacioppo, Reis, and Zautra, each person attending to their own needs and being able to cope with and protect themself does not ensure group success, and can actually lessen the probability of individual success over the long run. It’s wrong to assume that each individual’s resilience will naturally ladder up to group-wide resilience.

Instead, they call for social resilience, which means acknowledging and documenting stress and harm coming from higher-order, even existential threats, beyond the sum of how each person might feel about their own lives. Further, it means investigating and tracking sources and contributing factors that are often systemic (policy, neighborhood design), invisible (culture, historical precedence), or vast (climate, natural disasters). Once we understand causes, we can work together to help the group recover and ensure future well-being. 

Other scholars have also used the term social resilience since this 2011 paper, though disciplines tend not to define it in the same way.

In public health, for example, social resilience often refers to aspects of a person’s environment and resources like whom they live with, what their level of income is, or whether they have access to health care and education. There are well-established links between these factors and an individual’s resilience—that is, their capacity to recover from or learn and grow from stress and adversity in healthy ways. Many people have dedicated their lives to improving equitable access to these resources for the betterment of humanity.

Articles also use the terms “community resilience”—measured by survey questions like “People in my community help each other during crises”—and “national resilience,” which refers to a group’s ability to handle crises. A 2013 paper by Markus Keck and Patrick Sakdapolrak offers this high-level definition: “Social resilience is the ability of social entities, that is, individuals, organizations or communities, to resist, adapt to, and recover quickly from disasters.”

Studies suggest that social resilience is not unique to humans. The prosocial underpinnings of social resilience were alluded to by none other than Charles Darwin, who concluded that “those communities [of animals and other creatures], which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members, would flourish best, and rear the greatest number of offspring.”

For example, insects are the most populous species on earth, and the most populous insects are ants. Ants rapidly adjust and adapt to demands and threats to the colony in seamlessly coordinated ways: They’ll make a raft from their bodies for all to survive a flood. While humans, too, can detect, monitor, and band together to fix the existential crises we face, that’s a path we need to consciously choose and pursue.

Evolutionary psychologist David Sloan-Wilson, professor of biology and anthropology at Binghamton University and founder and president of ProSocial World, thinks so, too. His work highlights the importance of interpersonal trust, a key facet of social resilience, for working together toward shared goals. Further, he describes how evolution has favored biological features that enable group-wide, collaborative, even amicable adaptation to environmental challenges:

Only when we could trust our social partners to work toward shared goals could we rely upon them to share meaningful information. Our ability to function as team players is reflected in anatomical features such as the whites of the human eye, which turn it into an organ of communication, and in basic cognitive skills such as the ability to point things out to others and to laugh in a group context, in addition to more advanced cognitive and cultural abilities.

More attention has been paid to investigating and strengthening resilience for individuals than for organizations or communities. Of course, individual resilience matters, and is certainly worth cultivating. For people who are more resilient, symptoms of stress don’t last as long, and upsetting personal experiences morph into fodder for meaningful learning and growth.

There are biological (e.g., greater heart rate variability), life context (e.g., safer neighborhoods), and behavioral (e.g., self-compassion, optimism) factors that influence a person’s individual resilience, and social life also plays a formative role. For example, people with loving, supportive caregivers early in life tend to get through hardship more easily, and people who have close relationships with friends and family tend to handle losses and setbacks more gracefully.

With some know-how and regular practice, most people can improve their own resilience. We can learn strategies for restoring calm and coping with difficulty, engage with uplifting activities, or adopt outlooks like gratefulness or optimism that buffer against despair. We can enrich and strengthen our interpersonal ties by offering and asking for compassion, and being more curious and humble.

But some sources of stress—like widespread ideological polarization, rampant social inequality, global pandemics, natural disasters, terrorist attacks, and warfare—aren’t just about you or me. They’re inescapably about all of us. While it can be convenient or momentarily comforting to avoid or dismiss, harm to people in one place imposes stress on everyone, like stories of violent crime spreading through social media.

Resilience to these broader shared threats requires more than what it takes to be individually resilient one person at a time. It requires us to clearly see the hazy collective weight that we all, regardless of privilege or power and to different degrees in any given moment, bear from shared sources of harm. It involves channeling our pooled stress toward teaming up—coming together to confront, document, address, and solution-find for the benefit of us all. It also involves documenting and accounting for the true costs of ignoring or escalating the sources to shared harm, such as extractive or exploitative practices or profiteering at the expense of collective well-being.

But how do we humans cultivate social resilience? In their paper, Cacioppo, Reis, and Zautra offer a list of nine personal resources for social resilience that can be strengthened with practice. I think their suggestions can be distilled into three actionable steps each person can take to contribute to social resilience.

1. Tune into, trust, and connect with people

Exercise your empathy muscles by paying more attention to other people’s expressions, noticing how this feels in your own body, and trying to understand what the others are feeling and why. Try to assume goodwill and look for common ground and shared humanity with others. You might even make a list of qualities, characteristics, or experiences you share with others, or reflect on times when you supported someone, or someone supported you. Marvel at all the ways that people seamlessly coordinate effort to make everyday life both interesting and full of opportunity. Make time for open-minded and honest conversations about meaningful issues, topics, and life experiences with people. Join group or community activities centered around creative expression, play, or activism that addresses unmet needs.

2. See the struggle, and do the best you can to help

When you encounter harm, try to discover ways that it may also harm you. Notice how that feels deep down. Ask how it reduces prosperity and the common good (such as loss of potential and progress, or costliness of repair). While honoring the self-protective urge to avoid or escape, aim instead to direct your inner tension toward approaching and doing whatever you can to remedy the situation. Try to offer help, even if it feels inconvenient, costly, untimely, or unpromising. Be more curious and humble about the context of harm and how you can be most helpful. Ask yourself: “Can I leave this shared circumstance, system, or space better than I found it?” Let the meaningful belonging gained from actively contributing to your community strengthen your heroic impulse to fix the world’s vexing challenges together with other people.

3. Constructively problem-solve and reconcile

Hone your cooperative mentality. In whatever settings you find yourself, try to work together with people to learn what each other’s pain points and threats are, and openly discuss where they might be coming from. Inquire and analyze how existing structures, policies, systems, and settings affect day-to-day experiences among the people you encounter, and crowdsource ideas for improvement. Exercise skills like labeling feelings clearly and authentically, and offering an effective apology to learn, grow, and deepen interpersonal connections even after disagreement or conflict. Ask for help, knowing that most people feel uplifted and honored by the opportunity to do something that matters. Uplift group morale and creativity by encouraging shared positive emotional experiences like moral elevation and amusement, and celebrating team successes. Leverage the varied perspectives and strengths from a diverse group to discover truly collaborative, innovative, and effective-long term solutions to shared challenges.

There are also contextual opportunities for scaffolding social resilience within a neighborhood or city, like designing free and inclusive spaces for people to gather in recreational, celebratory, and awe-inspiring ways (e.g., parks, community events). Safe, inviting opportunities for storytelling and public dialogue around key issues and concerns also improve social resilience. Increasing social resilience, in turn, can shape civic institutions in ways that benefit everyone. According to the “Well-being and State Effectiveness” chapter of the 2023 World Happiness Report, countries that routinely channel resources toward common interests (e.g., improving social well-being) score significantly higher on a composite measure of national prosperity that includes per capital income, collective capacity, and more peaceableness.

Social resilience, like individual resilience, takes practice. As a bipedal species, we are equipped with the innate urges to roll, scoot, crawl, then walk, but if we want to walk bravely into older adulthood, we cannot just passively expect it. We cannot just sit comfortably all day. Regular physical activity is crucial to lifelong health and longevity. The same goes for social resilience: Getting better at seeing the shared burden that broader, more pervasive problems impose and prioritizing coming together to support one another and find solutions take regular practice, which may not always feel easy or convenient.

Rejuvenating and investing in social resilience means explicitly studying and documenting the shared harm of widespread, existential threats and joining forces to solve them—to preempt avoidable destruction, and to help each other recover from painful disasters. Would systematically measuring, educating, and optimizing for social resilience promise a better, smarter, less wasteful future? Leaning into how we naturally synchronize emotionally, perceptually, and behaviorally—and using our inborn “forest in the trees” capacity to see the world through a more global, long-term, course-of-human-survival lens—social resilience could amplify our potential to mobilize together to address threats and find fixes that can, while minimizing harm, protect and uplift us all.

To my right, a friend of Jamie’s struck up a conversation with my mom. They looked like an incongruous pair: a five-foot-tall Chinese American grandmother, with short silver hair, and him a six-foot-plus-tall white young man, bending his head so he could hear her faint voice over the music and party chatter. I leaned closer to listen in. She inquired about his undergraduate major in economics and philosophy, and shared that she’d received a Ph.D. in economics herself, with a focus on demography.

Their conversation struck me at the time as an anomaly. He listened with courtesy and interest, asked polite follow-up questions about her demographic interests, and didn’t seem the least bit eager to cut it short to join his peers. Did he realize that Gen Z wasn’t supposed to behave this way? According to social media and many commentators, they are supposed to be scared to talk to strangers and buried in their phones, too stunted by social anxiety and naval gazing to engage with the world around them. After all, this generation grew up in a “challenging and constantly changing global environment,” as Nisreen Ameen and colleagues note in a 2023 paper—which is one of the factors that led them to experience higher levels of depression, anxiety, and loneliness than prior generations. 

But over the course of the weekend, I encountered young person after young person who seemed open to learning and evolving. They were engaged in creative discovery and expression, seeking to change their community for the better, deeply caring about their peers and the relationships they had made in the previous four years.

“Obies” (as Oberlin students are called) aren’t alone. A series of in-depth interviews on multiple college campuses found that “the typical Gen Zer is a self-driver who deeply cares about others, strives for a diverse community, is highly collaborative and social, values flexibility, relevance, authenticity, and non-hierarchical leadership,” according to research led by Stanford University professor Roberta Katz. A McKinsey & Co. analysis of the newest members of the workforce, a few years ahead of this year’s graduating seniors, describes them as “socially progressive dreamers” who are pragmatic, seeking purpose, and deeply concerned about climate change and inequality.

As these new graduates navigate the months and years ahead, I reflected, these characteristics will serve them as well as any of the facts and figures they’ve learned in college. I left the graduation weekend thinking that, perhaps, the future is in good hands after all with the newest generation of workers and future leaders. Could it be that the reinforcements have arrived?

A gloomy future?

This graduation season has been marked by doom and gloom. Amid the bleak job market, disruption from artificial intelligence, and global violence, new graduates could be forgiven for embarking on their foray into the working world with trepidation. Indeed, commencement speeches on the promise of AI drew boos from the graduating seniors at other universities, such as the University of Arizona, where former Google CEO Eric Schmidt received a not-so-warm response.

I admit that I’ve harbored some fears about how my children will navigate the future, too. After all, I wrote an entire book about the dramatic increase in mental and behavioral disorders in this generation, and spent over a decade in journalism covering how economic disruption affected working families and their pocketbooks.

It’s a perfect storm of uncertainty: social, economic, geopolitical, and technological change like a black cloud over this time of transition. One student told me that she’d sent out over a hundred resumes, with not a single response. Throughout the graduation weekend, I resisted asking seniors I encountered about their plans for the future, for fear of bringing up an anxiety-laden topic. It gave me a pang to sense the unease in the air, when I’d wish that new graduates feel the world is at their feet, with many possible promising paths ahead for career and life.

Oberlin holds a unique place among institutions of higher learning, being the first to admit women and the first to admit Black students. The tradition of social action continues today. The college achieved a goal of carbon neutrality in 2025 and hosted student demonstrations against the war in Gaza over the past two years.

Students continue to push the administration on divestment from war, support for undocumented and immigrant students, preventing sexual assault, and supporting student-run housing and meal cooperatives. They complain that the college leadership focuses more on revenue and growth than Oberlin’s core values, both the president and the board of trustees, which denied the student divestment proposal.

At this year’s graduation ceremonies, when the chair of the board of trustees took the stage, the graduating class stood up and turned their backs to him. For the duration of his remarks, they held white pieces of paper in the air bearing a variety of messages, such as “Protect Trans Students” and “Divest from Genocide” and “Become a Sanctuary Campus.” When they crossed the stage to accept their diplomas, a number of students handed the paper to Oberlin President Carmen Ambar before shaking her hand. I was impressed at the respectful display of their principles, a compromise between outright boos and doing nothing.

At a picnic hosted by the Oberlin Student Cooperative Association, I saw this confident leadership on display again. The student-run, non-profit corporation feeds and houses many Oberlin students, including my son, serving up giant vats of lentils, trays of bread, and other hearty fare three times a day through the school year. The commitment is significant: five shifts a week on a planning, cooking, or clean-up crew, and shared decision making.

Jamie had already told us about the experience of voting on policy changes, which had to be unanimous—meaning deliberations could truly drag on. His coop involvement made sense with our family’s values of hard work and community service: My husband Brian served as a captain in the U.S. Public Health Service, which paid for the vast majority of Jamie’s college tuition, through the G.I. Bill.

The outgoing OSCA president, a graduating senior, gave a speech as professional as any I’ve heard through most of my career, thanking that day’s crew for feeding hundreds of alums, graduating students, and families; sharing the organization’s mission; and updating the assembled picnickers on lease negotiations with the college administration. She thanked her leadership team and her mother, and her poise gave me a flash-forward of the future day when she might be leading a political campaign or acknowledging donors to a nonprofit.

Creativity and connection

Art and music threaded throughout the graduation weekend. We walked through the senior art studios and photography lab, admiring the innovative collages, black-and-white photography, and textured prints exploring a range of themes: identity, relationship, nature, and design. At a showcase for graduating film students, we watched short films exploring interpersonal relationships, the impact of a hoarder’s death on her daughter, and an Oberlin conductor’s connections between his Venezuelan roots and the music of Dmitri Shostakovich, who composed under the thumb of the Soviet government.

One short documentary about couples who met late in life, filmed at the Kendal retirement community abutting the campus, struck me in its portrayal of how these relationships can be ones of convenience or deep love, depending on the situation. I felt surprised that a college student would find old-age love a compelling topic, and that the filmmaker succeeded in drawing out 80-somethings to discuss their sex lives, loneliness, and other intimate topics. Talking later to the student, I discovered that her professor had encouraged her to trim the film to 15 minutes, but she couldn’t bear to cut any more portions of her interviews.

In the film showcase and throughout the campus, visual arts shone, as well: delicate animations that conveyed the passing of time and eye-catching graphics and murals. Our oldest daughter remarked that students generally seemed engaged in conversation, not buried in their phones. When festivities hit a lull, I’d often turn around to find my son and his friends engaged in a game of cards or Scattergories.

Their house seemed like a revolving door of housemates, relatives, neighbors, and friends, including recent graduates returning to celebrate the next crop of Obies. Everyone was unfailingly friendly and kind, greeting me and my parents with interest, engaging Jamie’s sisters in conversation, and open to getting to know anyone who happened to be in the same space. When tables or counters became crowded with dirty plates and cups, there always seemed to be a student taking out the trash or doing dishes. And they cheered each other on by attending each other’s screenings, recitals, concerts, sports games, and open studios.

I left the weekend feeling unexpectedly moved by the other students, in addition to seeing my own accept his diploma, of course. The thousands of 20-somethings on this campus aren’t alone in creating art and music that probes who we are as a society and what our relationships mean, or in taking action to change their communities. This is the generation that walked out of elementary school to protest gun violence and launched the careers of David Hogg and Greta Thunberg. This is what young people have always done, push human society to be the best version of itself. It’s often when times are the darkest and most uncertain that we turn to them for comfort and hope. Whether the writings of Anne Frank in the Holocaust or the voice of Joan Baez in the Vietnam War era, these voices carry unexpected and needed messages. The answer is in our relationships, in our commitment to and caring for each other.

As author Rebecca Solnit argues, the hero is often the collective, not a lone charismatic figure. We ignore at our peril “that individual actors and collective forces can suddenly emerge or implode, that history often takes sharp turns, that something that has held for decades or centuries can suddenly snap,” she writes.

Ultimately, none of us know what the future holds. We are building it in the present, every day. With these idealistic, creative, community-minded young people joining the ranks of changemakers, I feel optimistic for the first time in a while.

The city ended the year with 12 homicides—a stark drop from 2012 when it recorded 67, a per capita rate 18 times the national average at the time.

I’m a professor of criminal justice who wrote a book on police reform efforts in Camden over the last 15 years. The stunning turnaround in violent crime has led Camden and its newly formed Camden County Police Department, which was established in 2013 and replaced the Camden City Police Department, to be hailed as a model of reform. In 2015, then-President Obama visited the city to highlight the progress made.

Positive national and international attention on police reform in Camden continued in 2020 following the murder of George Floyd. This attention stemmed from the Minneapolis city council’s unanimous decision to dissolve the Minneapolis Police Department and start anew—much as Camden had done seven years earlier.

Yet one topic that I believe such discussions and commentary often overlook is the role that community and activist groups, as well as local media, played in better policing by the Camden County Police Department.

County takeover of city police department

Under-policing came to define the final years of the Camden City Police Department, or CPD. Police presence in the community was largely absent.

In contrast, the Camden County Police Department, or CCPD, began its new mandate with an aggressive, broken-windows style of policing that included targeting low levels of disorder and quality-of-life offenses, like loitering.

Residents were concerned about this new aggressive stance. The American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey, researchers, and local media used New Jersey’s Open Public Records Act to collect measures of the CCPD’s activity.

This data pointed to a troubling rise in officer-initiated vehicle and pedestrian stops, tickets for low-level violations, use of force, and citizen complaints of excessive force through 2014 and 2015.

CCPD officers in 2014 made 60,352 total stops, including 16,742 of people on foot. The per capita rate of pedestrian stops exceeded the rates in both New York City and Philadelphia during those cities’ peak stop-and-frisk years in 2011 and 2009, respectively, before stop-and-frisk tactics spurred court-ordered reforms.

Beyond the stops, CCPD officers issued more than 6,000 citations from May 1, 2013, when the new department launched, through the end of the year. They issued over 19,000 citations in 2014. During its first year or so, the CCPD’s total number of cases in municipal court increased by nearly 30% relative to the year prior.

Similarly, the number of tickets issued for minor infractions—such as riding a bicycle without a bell or a light, and disorderly conduct—rose steeply. For example, the number of citations for having tinted car windows more than tripled, while citations for not having proper car lights or reflectors more than quadrupled.

Backlash to broken-windows policing

Citizen complaints against CCPD alleging excessive use of force increased from 35 in 2013 to 65 in 2014.

Organizations like the Camden County chapter of the NAACP and the ACLU-NJ drummed up attention to these figures by issuing announcements and press briefings. On the same day in May 2015 that President Obama heralded the CCPD, the ACLU-NJ issued a scathing rebuke to the President’s message. It read, in part: “Before we hold Camden up as a model of community policing, we must address the troubling indicators that point to Camden’s use of practices that appear to take a page from a broken windows approach to policing.”

Mobilized residents and groups, including clergy members, made it clear that they did not appreciate this level and type of aggressive policing. The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Star-Ledger/NJ Advance Media amplified the coverage of Camden’s heavy-handed tactics.

What followed was a complete change in behavior among the CCPD from an activity, training, and policy perspective. The numbers and rates of police stops declined. CCPD officers began issuing more warnings compared to tickets, to the point that “warnings over summonses” became an unofficial slogan of the department.

The top brass at CCPD sought out and implemented two types of de-escalation training, starting in the spring of 2015, for all officers. The CCPD also started to explore a complete overhaul of the agency’s use of force policy. It eventually adopted a more restrictive policy that emphasized de-escalation and the sanctity of life, while prohibiting tactics like chokeholds and shooting at moving vehicles. The CCPD’s innovative policy even inspired the New Jersey Attorney General to revamp its statewide policy years later.

As a result, complaints of use of force, in general, and of excessive force dropped from 43 in 2015 to 28 in 2016, and declined to 16 in 2017 and just three in 2018. Such complaints have usually been in the single digits each year since.

The CCPD deserves credit for course-correcting. But I believe it’s important to remember where that impetus came from: community and activist groups, as well as local media attention.

Many fewer murders, but persistent challenges

Camden has undoubtedly made progress. The city’s homicide rate in 2025 was four times the national average—a marked change from 18 times the national average in 2012. Homicides across the country have also declined in recent years.

Yet problems persist. Camden is still a perennial contender for the most violent city in New Jersey. Despite a $1.6 billion economic package from the state to the city during the 2010s, which overwhelmingly took the form of tax subsidies to encourage businesses to either stay in or relocate to Camden, almost every census tract is among the most socially and economically disadvantaged in the state. Most companies that receive tax breaks do not employ a meaningful number of Camden residents.

The city is racially segregated from the rest of Camden County and the broader South Jersey region.

In my opinion, Camden, like most other cities, relies too much on the police, giving them a monopoly on public safety. I believe both the city and the CCPD should take a cue from places like Newark, New Jersey, and St. Louis, Missouri, to find innovative ways to collaborate and engage more with community groups, business associations, and other non-police entities. Together they can co-produce public safety and take a more holistic approach to reducing crime, violence, and disorder.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

For some families, long hours are a necessity. But for others, the pressure to keep working can be rooted in a sense of obligation—to be ever more successful, maintain a certain lifestyle, or simply keep up with expectations shaped by a consumeristic and highly individualistic culture. No matter what the motivation, over time, these pressures can accumulate, leaving parents feeling stretched thin, chronically stressed, and out of balance.

So how should we think about balance?

We are seeing conversations about shorter workweeks and changing norms gain traction—and, in fact, average work hours have been falling. Unfortunately, however, many experts say these trends are driven by serious burnout. According to Gallup, “overall employee well-being has been on the decline” and “employees now have less trust in institutions in general and feel more detached from their employers.” Employee engagement is plummeting.

Perhaps in response, many people appear to be seeking jobs that allow for more balance. Many of us now carry an implicit vision of a “balanced” life as one in which we are living a “perfect” life: thriving at work, fully present with our families and friends, and consistently caring for our own well-being. That vision can be inspiring—but it can also be exhausting. Many wonder if balance is possible or even desirable. For most, the perfect balance seems out of reach.

Situations vary, but life inevitably involves tradeoffs and “imperfections.” We are constantly deciding what to prioritize and, at times, what to let go—at least for a while. It’s no surprise that many parents report struggling to meet the demands of both work and family. But what if the challenge isn’t simply about achieving balance? What if it’s about how we’re approaching it?

In a recent article, researcher Jamie Alexander and her colleagues propose that when it comes to navigating work and family, it may be more helpful to begin with a different question: What gives my life a sense of purpose?

How purpose can help

Purpose is often defined as an enduring life goal that is meaningful to us personally and contributes to something beyond ourselves. Studies have found that people with a greater sense of purpose tend to experience a range of benefits, including greater life satisfaction and optimism, better sleep, healthier habits, and even reduced risk of certain health problems.

But what does this have to do with work-family balance?

Researchers suggest that work-family conflict—the sense that the two domains are interfering with each other—often arises from a few recurring patterns. These patterns include: stress spilling over from one domain into another, demands piling up beyond what feels manageable, shifts in long-established roles or responsibilities causing discomfort, conflicts between roles requiring difficult tradeoffs, or a sense of being stuck in a role. These tensions don’t just affect parents—they can ripple outward, shaping how we connect with and respond to our children.

A strong sense of purpose can act as an anchor in the midst of these competing demands.

Imagine coming home after a long day, already feeling depleted, only to discover your child hasn’t done their homework. You try to get them to do it, but instead they get upset. In that moment, it’s natural to feel overwhelmed or frustrated. But if part of your purpose is to raise a child who feels supported and grows into a compassionate, capable adult, that same moment may begin to look different. Instead of just another stressor, it can become an opportunity to live out that purpose—with patience, guidance, or curiosity.

Purpose doesn’t remove life stressors. But it can change how we interpret and respond to them.

One study found that people with a stronger sense of purpose don’t necessarily experience fewer daily stressors—but they tend to show smaller increases in difficult emotions, like anger, frustration, and loneliness, as well as physical symptoms, like headache, fatigue, or cough, in response to those stressors.

In that way, purpose might help to buffer against the stressors at the root of work-family conflict, making it easier for us to respond in ways that align with who we want to be. In doing so, a sense of purpose doesn’t just support individual well-being—it can ripple outward, strengthening parenting, deepening family relationships, and fostering the conditions in which children can thrive.

Of course, some conflicts require real sacrifices. Time is finite, and we can’t do everything.

Alexander and her colleagues’ model suggests that instead of asking, “How do I perfectly balance all my responsibilities at work and at home?,” we might ask a different question: “How do my choices align with what matters most to me?”

When we use purpose as a guide, decisions about what to prioritize—or let go—can become clearer. Rather than striving for an idealized balance, we begin to organize our lives around what feels meaningful, which in turn can help reduce the tension we feel when trying to balance our work and family life. Research finds that people with a stronger sense of purpose report experiencing less conflict between work and personal life—and are more likely to experience these domains as supporting one another, rather than competing. 

How to cultivate purpose

For some, this idea may feel reassuring—you already have a sense of purpose but haven’t fully used it to guide your decisions. For others, it may feel uncertain; especially if you don’t feel clear about your purpose, you may be wondering what this all means for you.

The good news is that purpose can grow and evolve over time. Research points to a few practices that can help. At the heart of each of these practices is reflection.

1. Reconnect with your purpose as a parent. Parenting often asks us to keep showing up through uncertainty, stress, and moments when progress is hard to see. When challenges pile up, it’s natural to question ourselves and lose touch with the deeper meaning behind our efforts. Taking the time to pause and reflect on our role as parents—and the hopes we have for our children—can help us reconnect with that deeper sense of purpose and stay invested even when things feel difficult.

2. Create a plan for your life. It’s easy to move through life on autopilot, simply trying to get through the day amid competing demands of work and family. Making space to reflect on our values, identify our goals, and create a plan for how we will pursue those goals can be especially meaningful when we feel disconnected from a sense of purpose. These steps help us realign our lives with what matters most in a way that feels more manageable.

3. Practice gratitude. Reflecting on the future and what we want for ourselves or our children can feel especially difficult when we’re pulled in many directions. If we’re not ready to start there, gratitude can offer a simpler place to begin. Taking a moment to notice and reflect on what we appreciate—small moments of connection with our children, support from a colleague, or a moment of laughter with our family—can help ground us in what matters most. Over time, these reflections can make it easier for us to identify where our sense of purpose lies.

Aligning work with purpose

Of course, not all of us have the freedom to change our circumstances in major ways. Financial needs, job constraints, and family responsibilities can limit our options.

But even within these constraints, small shifts can make a difference. Research on “job crafting” suggests that people can enhance the meaning of their work by making changes in three areas:

• Tasks: adjusting what they do, when possible;
• Mindset: reframing how they think about their work and its impact;
• Relationships: building stronger connections with others.

For those of us with limited flexibility in our roles, we might focus on changing how we think about our work and investing in relationships at work to make our days feel more meaningful. One study found that hospital cleaners who saw themselves as part of the care team—recognizing that their work contributes to patients’ health—reported greater enjoyment and meaning in their jobs. It’s the difference between seeing your role as simply mopping the floor versus seeing it as helping to prevent harm by keeping patients’ environments clean and safe.

These shifts, while sometimes small, can help align our work with a broader sense of purpose—and in doing so, these shifts may ease the tensions between work and family. Research finds that parents who experience greater meaning in their work—scholars distinguish meaning from purpose, purpose forms part of one’s sense of meaning—also report less work-family conflict, lower strain, and a stronger sense that their work and family lives enrich one another.

Work-family balance may be best viewed as something we aren’t expected to fully “solve” once and for all. When we ground our choices in our purpose, we can move away from an exhausting search for equilibrium—and toward a life that feels more coherent, intentional, and connected to what truly matters.

Someone in America dies by suicide every 11 minutes. It’s that common. But not normal.

Humans have evolved over centuries to survive. So when people try to kill themselves, something has gone wrong. Typically, the assumption is that something happened in the person’s mind—a mental illness.

But in recent decades, there’s been a growing movement to ask a different question: What went wrong in the world around that person?

For Chris Pawelski, it was a torrent of factors. His dad—one of his best friends, whom he worked with daily for decades—was diagnosed with renal cancer and died six months later. Pawelski was left as the primary caregiver for his mom, who had dementia.

His family’s multigenerational onion farm in New York’s Orange County—where he first worked as a five year old, collecting onions that fell out of crates—was hemorrhaging money. Pawelski said he was growing roughly $200,000 worth of crops some years but took home only about $20,000, unable to negotiate higher prices with wholesale buyers that dominated the market.

Debt to suppliers and equipment vendors piled up, and the burden strained his marriage. He had little time for friends, working sunup to sundown seven days a week, desperately trying to preserve his family’s legacy.

“It’s all stuff collapsing down upon you,” he said. “It’s weeks, months, years of dealing with all sorts of pressures that you can’t alleviate.”

Pawelski started wondering what it would be like to get hit by a truck on the busy road in front of his house. “You think you’re already on your way out, so why wait?” he said.

Millions of Americans have serious thoughts of killing themselves, and tens of thousands die by suicide annually. Suicide repeatedly ranks among the top 10 leading causes of death—making the U.S. an outlier among developed nations.

Prevention efforts have typically focused on connecting individuals in crisis with treatment—despite therapy and medication being notoriously expensive, the health care system struggling to meet demand, and a consensus that suicide is caused by a host of factors, including but not limited to mental illness.

Now, many people working to prevent suicide, including some who have tried to harm themselves or lost a loved one to it, are calling for a broader approach. Some were galvanized by the COVID pandemic, when rates of anxiety and depression spiked—not because everyone’s brain chemistry suddenly changed but because the world changed. That led many to believe that, while treatments and crisis care are vital, the goal of suicide prevention needs to expand beyond stopping people from dying to also giving them reasons to live.

“It’s not rocket science,” said Sally Spencer-Thomas, a psychologist and internationally recognized suicide prevention researcher who lost her brother to suicide. If “you have happier, healthier people, they live longer, happier lives.”

That means suicide prevention shouldn’t be limited to answering hotlines or treating patients in psychiatric wards, she said. It should also involve running food banks to ensure families don’t go hungry or hosting weekly book clubs for homebound seniors to make friends. It can take the form of school programs that build resilience in children or housing policies that prevent evictions.

Decades of research shows these types of initiatives—even if they don’t have the words “mental health” or “suicide” in the title—can reduce the number of people who kill themselves. They often lower rates of crime, addiction, and poverty, too.

The U.S. has lagged behind other countries in adopting this approach, Spencer-Thomas said, perhaps because it’s easier—and more politically palatable—to tell someone to go to therapy than it is to enact sweeping policy changes, such as an increased minimum wage.

“As long as we have that convenient narrative that it’s just a bunch of broken people needing medicine and treatment, then we’re never accountable for fixing the broken things in our communities,” Spencer-Thomas said.

The Trump administration’s approach

Overhauling suicide prevention efforts to focus on broad social and economic policies might seem overwhelming and unrealistic—especially right now. This approach requires large upfront investments that lack across-the-board support, either because of budgeting realities or ideological bents.

President Donald Trump and his appointees have said little about suicide directly, but many of their policies do the opposite of what research shows prevents suicide.

The administration has championed cuts to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program that are projected to leave millions of people without health insurance and food stamps in coming years. It has injected uncertainty into the economy through the war with Iran, seesawing tariff policy, and mass layoffs of federal employees. It has canceled $1 billion in grants for school-based mental health initiatives, gutted federal programs that focus on at-risk blue-collar workers, and cut gun violence research. (Suicides are the most common type of gun death in America.)

“All of these changes are creating a firestorm,” said Hannah Wesolowski, the chief advocacy officer for the National Alliance on Mental Illness. They can cause “extreme stress and anxiety” in people’s lives, she added, and “when people feel desperate, that’s when crises can emerge.”

Federal health officials insist that suicide prevention remains a priority.

Allison Arwady, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s injury center, said the agency is focused on creating systems that can support people “no matter what may be happening” in the world around them. “There’s always going to be turmoil in people’s lives,” she added.

Arwady and Brandon Johnson, who leads suicide prevention work at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, said several of the Trump administration’s priorities align with an upstream approach.

For example, they said, its focus on youth physical and mental well-being could help address the increasing suicide risk among adolescents, since exercise is proven to improve mental health. Similarly, people who are homeless have higher rates of suicide, and the administration has been pushing them into treatment. Federal officials have also encouraged partnerships with religious organizations, and research shows members of faith communities are less likely to attempt suicide.

However, the Trump administration has made steep staff cuts at the CDC and SAMHSA and has repeatedly called for decreasing their budgets, leading to questions about whether or how this work will continue.

A history of medical and crisis care

Suicide prevention reached the national stage in the late 1990s, said Deb Stone, who worked at the CDC for 15 years before joining the Jed Foundation, a nonprofit focused on teen and young-adult mental health.

As suicide rates grew among young people, a group of government officials, clinicians, and advocates gathered in Reno, Nevada, in 1998 to discuss the pressing issue. Over the next few years, the surgeon general issued a landmark call to action and the federal government published its first national strategy for suicide prevention.

These documents acknowledged the role of society and economics in suicide risk but focused heavily on identifying people in crisis and increasing access to medical treatment.

Those are critical steps to suicide prevention, many mental health researchers and clinicians say. They’re also politically favorable. For elected officials, who have a few years to demonstrate their achievements before the next campaign, it’s easier to count the number of people receiving therapy than the number of people who never developed suicidal thoughts because long-term economic and social investments helped them maintain steady jobs and strong friendships.

The push for individual treatment also comes from a pervasive misconception that suicide is always the result of an underlying mental illness, said Maddy Reinert, who is the senior director of population health at Mental Health America and contributed to a 2025 national report on upstream suicide prevention.

Although researchers debate how many people who die by suicide had a mental health condition—with estimates from less than half to about 90%—the takeaway is that mental illness is not the sole cause, Reinert said. That means treating it can’t be the sole response.

Plus, mental illnesses can be triggered and exacerbated by life circumstances. Treating depressive symptoms without looking at factors such as childhood trauma, the loss of a loved one, or being laid off from a job is an incomplete approach, many mental health researchers and clinicians say.

The COVID pandemic, especially, made people in the field recognize “we really need to address all of these conditions that are creating stress, anxiety, and crises,” Stone said.

In July 2022, the federal government launched 988—a shorter number for the national suicide crisis line, meant to provide an alternative to 911 for mental health emergencies.

Monica Johnson, who led federal work on 988, said the infusion of money and attention on the hotline helped states build better crisis response systems, from centers that answer calls to mobile crisis units.

But that’s not enough to solve America’s suicide problem, she said. “You’ll never be able to build a system based on crisis alone.”

Help for the farm and the farmer

Pawelski, the onion farmer in New York, hit his breaking point in 2020.

He had a decent crop that year, but Canadian exporters were dumping cheap onions into American markets, making it difficult for him to sell his product.

“I was having to beg people” to buy, he said. And when he managed to sell, prices were comparable to prices in the 1980s.

By the end of the season, he had incurred losses of a few hundred thousand dollars.

He said he and his wife decided, “We couldn’t afford to grow onions again.”

The idea that his family’s onion farm would end with him was “soul-crushing,” Pawelski said. He lost weight rapidly and thought about ending his life.

He and his wife called NY FarmNet for help. Founded at Cornell University in 1986, the free program connects farmers with two consultants: a financial analyst specializing in farm planning and a social worker focused on emotional concerns and family dynamics.

The financial specialist helped Pawelski develop a new business plan. Instead of farming onions for wholesale, he could grow greens, tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants at a small scale to sell directly to consumers. He could upgrade an old truck with a cooler and deliver produce to people’s doors. He would supplement that income with teaching, speaking engagements, and other work that took advantage of his master’s degree in communications.

The social worker helped him accept that new reality—equally crucial, Pawelski said. “If you’re pissed off” about the change, “no matter what kind of proposal or idea they have, it’s not going to go anywhere.”

The adjustment took months. Pawelski also saw a therapist during that time.

Then one day a neighbor noted that Pawelski seemed much happier. That “caught me off guard,” Pawelski recalled. He didn’t realize his inner transformation was so apparent.

Today, Pawelski’s business has stabilized, and he and his wife are paying down debt. Pawelski advocates for programs to help farmers’ mental health and address their higher-than-average suicide rates.

That can mean crisis hotlines and access to affordable therapy, Pawelski said. But what he really wants are policy changes that help farmers get fair prices for their produce, debt relief, and the installation of broadband internet in rural areas so farm families and employees can be connected.

“We need to think broader and longer-term than a helpline,” he said. That’s “a band-aid on a gunshot wound.”

This article first appeared on KFF Health News and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF. ]]> If you or someone you know may be experiencing a mental health crisis, contact the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline in the U.S. by dialing or texting “988 or find the suicide hotline in your country.” Someone in America dies by suicide every 11 minutes. It’s that common. But not normal. Humans have evolved over centuries to survive. So when people try to kill themselves, something has gone wrong. Typically, the assumption is that something happened in the person’s mind—a mental illness. But in recent decades, there’s been a growing movement to ask a different question: What went wrong in the world around that person? For Chris Pawelski, it was a torrent of factors. His dad—one of his best friends, whom he worked with daily for decades—was diagnosed with renal cancer and died six months later. Pawelski was left as the primary caregiver for his mom, who had dementia. His family’s multigenerational onion farm in New York’s Orange County—where he first worked as a five year old, collecting onions that fell out of crates—was hemorrhaging money. Pawelski said he was growing roughly $200,000 worth of crops some years but took home only about $20,000, unable to negotiate higher prices with wholesale buyers that dominated the market. Debt to suppliers and equipment vendors piled up, and the burden strained his marriage. He had little time for friends, working sunup to sundown seven days a week, desperately trying to preserve his family’s legacy. “It’s all stuff collapsing down upon you,” he said. “It’s weeks, months, years of dealing with all sorts of pressures that you can’t alleviate.” Pawelski started wondering what it would be like to get hit by a truck on the busy road in front of his house. “You think you’re already on your way out, so why wait?” he said. Millions of Americans have serious thoughts of killing themselves, and tens of thousands die by suicide annually. Suicide repeatedly ranks among the top 10 leading causes of death—making the U.S. an outlier among developed nations. Prevention efforts have typically focused on connecting individuals in crisis with treatment—despite therapy and medication being notoriously expensive, the health care system struggling to meet demand, and a consensus that suicide is caused by a host of factors, including but not limited to mental illness. Now, many people working to prevent suicide, including some who have tried to harm themselves or lost a loved one to it, are calling for a broader approach. Some were galvanized by the COVID pandemic, when rates of anxiety and depression spiked—not because everyone’s brain chemistry suddenly changed but because the world changed. That led many to believe that, while treatments and crisis care are vital, the goal of suicide prevention needs to expand beyond stopping people from dying to also giving them reasons to live. “It’s not rocket science,” said Sally Spencer-Thomas, a psychologist and internationally recognized suicide prevention researcher who lost her brother to suicide. If “you have happier, healthier people, they live longer, happier lives.” That means suicide prevention shouldn’t be limited to answering hotlines or treating patients in psychiatric wards, she said. It should also involve running food banks to ensure families don’t go hungry or hosting weekly book clubs for homebound seniors to make friends. It can take the form of school programs that build resilience in children or housing policies that prevent evictions. Decades of research shows these types of initiatives—even if they don’t have the words “mental health” or “suicide” in the title—can reduce the number of people who kill themselves. They often lower rates of crime, addiction, and poverty, too. The U.S. has lagged behind other countries in adopting this approach, Spencer-Thomas said, perhaps because it’s easier—and more politically palatable—to tell someone to go to therapy than it is to enact sweeping policy changes, such as an increased minimum wage. “As long as we have that convenient narrative that it’s just a bunch of broken people needing medicine and treatment, then we’re never accountable for fixing the broken things in our communities,” Spencer-Thomas said. The Trump administration’s approach Overhauling suicide prevention efforts to focus on broad social and economic policies might seem overwhelming and unrealistic—especially right now. This approach requires large upfront investments that lack across-the-board support, either because of budgeting realities or ideological bents. President Donald Trump and his appointees have said little about suicide directly, but many of their policies do the opposite of what research shows prevents suicide. The administration has championed cuts to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program that are projected to leave millions of people without health insurance and food stamps in coming years. It has injected uncertainty into the economy through the war with Iran, seesawing tariff policy, and mass layoffs of federal employees. It has canceled $1 billion in grants for school-based mental health initiatives, gutted federal programs that focus on at-risk blue-collar workers, and cut gun violence research. (Suicides are the most common type of gun death in America.) “All of these changes are creating a firestorm,” said Hannah Wesolowski, the chief advocacy officer for the National Alliance on Mental Illness. They can cause “extreme stress and anxiety” in people’s lives, she added, and “when people feel desperate, that’s when crises can emerge.” Federal health officials insist that suicide prevention remains a priority. Allison Arwady, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s injury center, said the agency is focused on creating systems that can support people “no matter what may be happening” in the world around them. “There’s always going to be turmoil in people’s lives,” she added. Arwady and Brandon Johnson, who leads suicide prevention work at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, said several of the Trump administration’s priorities align with an upstream approach. For example, they said, its focus on youth physical and mental well-being could help address the increasing suicide risk among adolescents, since exercise is proven to improve mental health. Similarly, people who are homeless have higher rates of suicide, and the administration has been pushing them into treatment. Federal officials have also encouraged partnerships with religious organizations, and research shows members of faith communities are less likely to attempt suicide. However, the Trump administration has made steep staff cuts at the CDC and SAMHSA and has repeatedly called for decreasing their budgets, leading to questions about whether or how this work will continue. A history of medical and crisis care Suicide prevention reached the national stage in the late 1990s, said Deb Stone, who worked at the CDC for 15 years before joining the Jed Foundation, a nonprofit focused on teen and young-adult mental health. As suicide rates grew among young people, a group of government officials, clinicians, and advocates gathered in Reno, Nevada, in 1998 to discuss the pressing issue. Over the next few years, the surgeon general issued a landmark call to action and the federal government published its first national strategy for suicide prevention. These documents acknowledged the role of society and economics in suicide risk but focused heavily on identifying people in crisis and increasing access to medical treatment. Those are critical steps to suicide prevention, many mental health researchers and clinicians say. They’re also politically favorable. For elected officials, who have a few years to demonstrate their achievements before the next campaign, it’s easier to count the number of people receiving therapy than the number of people who never developed suicidal thoughts because long-term economic and social investments helped them maintain steady jobs and strong friendships. The push for individual treatment also comes from a pervasive misconception that suicide is always the result of an underlying mental illness, said Maddy Reinert, who is the senior director of population health at Mental Health America and contributed to a 2025 national report on upstream suicide prevention. Although researchers debate how many people who die by suicide had a mental health condition—with estimates from less than half to about 90%—the takeaway is that mental illness is not the sole cause, Reinert said. That means treating it can’t be the sole response. Plus, mental illnesses can be triggered and exacerbated by life circumstances. Treating depressive symptoms without looking at factors such as childhood trauma, the loss of a loved one, or being laid off from a job is an incomplete approach, many mental health researchers and clinicians say. The COVID pandemic, especially, made people in the field recognize “we really need to address all of these conditions that are creating stress, anxiety, and crises,” Stone said. In July 2022, the federal government launched 988—a shorter number for the national suicide crisis line, meant to provide an alternative to 911 for mental health emergencies. Monica Johnson, who led federal work on 988, said the infusion of money and attention on the hotline helped states build better crisis response systems, from centers that answer calls to mobile crisis units. But that’s not enough to solve America’s suicide problem, she said. “You’ll never be able to build a system based on crisis alone.” Help for the farm and the farmer Pawelski, the onion farmer in New York, hit his breaking point in 2020. He had a decent crop that year, but Canadian exporters were dumping cheap onions into American markets, making it difficult for him to sell his product. “I was having to beg people” to buy, he said. And when he managed to sell, prices were comparable to prices in the 1980s. By the end of the season, he had incurred losses of a few hundred thousand dollars. He said he and his wife decided, “We couldn’t afford to grow onions again.” The idea that his family’s onion farm would end with him was “soul-crushing,” Pawelski said. He lost weight rapidly and thought about ending his life. He and his wife called NY FarmNet for help. Founded at Cornell University in 1986, the free program connects farmers with two consultants: a financial analyst specializing in farm planning and a social worker focused on emotional concerns and family dynamics. The financial specialist helped Pawelski develop a new business plan. Instead of farming onions for wholesale, he could grow greens, tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants at a small scale to sell directly to consumers. He could upgrade an old truck with a cooler and deliver produce to people’s doors. He would supplement that income with teaching, speaking engagements, and other work that took advantage of his master’s degree in communications. The social worker helped him accept that new reality—equally crucial, Pawelski said. “If you’re pissed off” about the change, “no matter what kind of proposal or idea they have, it’s not going to go anywhere.” The adjustment took months. Pawelski also saw a therapist during that time. Then one day a neighbor noted that Pawelski seemed much happier. That “caught me off guard,” Pawelski recalled. He didn’t realize his inner transformation was so apparent. Today, Pawelski’s business has stabilized, and he and his wife are paying down debt. Pawelski advocates for programs to help farmers’ mental health and address their higher-than-average suicide rates. That can mean crisis hotlines and access to affordable therapy, Pawelski said. But what he really wants are policy changes that help farmers get fair prices for their produce, debt relief, and the installation of broadband internet in rural areas so farm families and employees can be connected. “We need to think broader and longer-term than a helpline,” he said. That’s “a band-aid on a gunshot wound.” This article first appeared on KFF Health News and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF. anxiety, death, depression, health care, mental health, policy, politics, society, suicide, Mental Health Professionals, Politics, Society, Big Ideas, Equality 2026-05-22T15:33:00+00:00