Video: Religion and Democratic Ideals: Media, Religion, and the Nation

“Media, Religion, and the Nation,” featured Zeba Khan, San Fransisco Chronicle, Jesse Holland, George Washington University, and Syreeta McFadden, Borough of Manhattan Community College. Assistant Dean for Religion and Public Life, Hussein Rashid, served as moderator. For decades, news media in the U.S. has been critiqued as reproducing structures of power and exclusion, including those in religions. While entertainment media has worked towards more inclusive storytelling recently, historically all media has been inconsistent in representing and engaging marginalized communities. This panel examined how media framing creates our understanding of what the United States is and how we can be more literate media consumers.

This was the second of four sessions in the Religion and Democratic Ideals series. This series focused on where religion intersects with democratic ideals and institutions.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

[MUSIC PLAYING]

SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School.

SPEAKER 2: Religion and Democratic Ideals. Media, Religion, and the Nation, October 1, 2024.

HUSSEIN RASHID: My name is Hussein Rashid, and I am the Assistant Dean for Religion and Public Life at Harvard Divinity School. Harvard University is located on the traditional and ancestral land of the Massachusett, the original inhabitants of what is now known as Boston and Cambridge. We pay respect to the people of the Massachusett tribe, past and present, and honor the land itself, which remains sacred to the Massachusett people.

Welcome, and thank you for being here this evening. Religion in Public Life is dedicated to the service of just world at peace. We work with a dynamic method that has religious literacy at its core and brings in critical analysis to understand and challenge systems of inequity. Our focus on just peace building recognizes that a peace without justice is not sustainable.

The goal of RPL programming is to bring analysis from experts, including academics and practitioners and those living in inequitable systems, and offer some ways forward to build a more just world. The program is founded and led by Diane L. Moore, Associate Dean for RPL. This series, like all, our programming, would not be possible without the support of our team, including Reem, Hilary, Anna, Natalie, Tammy, and Rachelle. I also want to mention Becca Leviss, the student who conceived of this series and has been instrumental in putting it together. Thanks to them all.

This series emerged from conversations with students about what politics and democracy mean. It became clear through these conversations that democracies exist in service to ideals. We are a program that looks at questions of structural inequities, so our response has to be about the structures functioning in our current political moment and working towards creating such structures of equitability. We are trying to respond to what we feel-- what our students are asking of US, while making sure we are true to who we are.

A liberal democracy should produce societies that are inclusive, equitable, dynamic and responsive to the needs of citizens. Thinking about outcomes that we want from a democratic system creates space for us to construct pathways to achieving those goals. For religion and Public Life, the conversation is democratic ideals. The focus of ideals of equitable and inclusive societies where every member is treated as valuable-- that is our lead into just peace building.

This particular event challenges us to think about how media shapes and even creates ideas of the nation, how stories are used to exclude and include people in what we do consider the nation. We pull as a framing for this event on the ideas of Benedict Anderson and his work, Imagined Communities, which focuses on the ways in which we imagine ourselves belonging to one body politic, even though we may have never met one another, and how that imagination of what and who the nation is always changing.

Anderson spoke about print capitalism, but our media consists of so many more options than print now. And who we consider as worthy of having a voice is expanded over the years. Tonight, we have three amazing speakers joining us-- Zeba Khan, who's joining us on camera; Jesse Holland, and Syreeta McFadden.

Zeba Khan is the Deputy Editorial Page Editor at the San Francisco Chronicle. As a freelance opinion writer, her op-eds on race, religion, and politics have appeared in national outlets, including The Boston Globe, CNN, and the Washington Post. She spent nearly a decade training and mentoring individuals from historically marginalized communities on how to craft powerful arguments as a Senior Facilitator at the Op-Ed Project, where she also served as Director of Fellowships.

Zeba is a 2018 John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University and has taught design thinking workshops for journalists of color at The Maynard Institute, as well as for journalism students at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.

Jesse Holland is a nationally recognized author of the award-winning books The Invisibles-- The Untold Story of African American Slaves Inside the White House and Black Men Built the Capitol-- Discovering African American History In and Around Washington, DC. He has also written novels and stories featuring some of the most popular science fiction and comic book heroes, including the Black Panther, Superman, Captain America, and characters from the Star Wars universe.

Jesse is also a long-time award-winning journalist, historian, and TV host, having been the former weekend anchor of Washington Journal on C-SPAN and a columnist at msnbc.com, and an Associated Press political reporter and feature writer in Washington, DC, New York, and Columbia, South Carolina. He is currently the Associate Director of the School of Media and Public Affairs at the George Washington University, where he also teaches advanced news reporting and cultural reporting.

Syreeta McFadden is a writer and Professor of English at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York. Syreeta's work deals largely with gender, politics, race, and culture, and explores the cultural narratives of communities.

Her work has been featured in The New York Times Magazine, The Nation, BuzzFeed News, NPR, Brooklyn Magazine, Feministing, and The Guardian, where she has been a regular contributor. A former urban planner and housing development specialist, she holds degrees from Columbia University and Sarah Lawrence College. She is currently working on a collection of essays.

I want to thank all of you for taking the time to be with us this evening. I am grateful because as we go through your resumes and your accomplishments, we know how busy you are. And I'm looking forward to learning so much from you and your expertise this evening.

I think the first place where it would be useful for us as an audience to begin and to understand is, what does this mean? What is religion, media, and the nation mean? Why is this relevant to you? Why do you think this is important? What are these topics all together mean? And Syreeta, I'll ask you to start us off, if you don't mind.

SYREETA MCFADDEN: Well, first off, thank you so much for having me. I am still wrestling with the answer to that question. It's dense and rich and layered in a sense that trying to make sense of the American story, which, in some ways overlaps and thinks about-- well, let me put it this way. America's origin story has so many religious overtones to it, obviously, because-- I don't need to necessarily rehash how the colonists came in looking for religious freedom.

But that mythos also trickled down and informs how our media structures work. What stories are prioritized? What stories are embraced? What stories and voices are elevated? And to a certain degree, it feels monolithic in a sense that there's one kind of dominant narrative that really is rooted in Christianity, and yeah-- and yeah, just rooted in Christianity.

So I'll just say very little on that because I'm still wrestling with that question, how, even though we're probably much more of a secular society, a lot like-- I think there was a recent study talking about the differences in younger people going to church, or at least the younger women attending churches across the nation. Their membership has dropped significantly.

Their politics are shifting significantly in light of a host of issues that have been drawn out to the fore through the presidential campaign in particular. So I think we're still wrestling with what that looks like and what that means in our media spaces, what that means in our-- yeah. I'll just say that.

HUSSEIN RASHID: Great. Thank you, Syreeta. And I'm glad you started us off by realizing that there is an embedded narrative. And it is so hegemonic. That is, it is so totalizing that we can't even begin to fully take it apart and dissect it. But we still need to make the effort. So just to make things a little simple, Jesse, I'll turn to you next.

JESSE HOLLAND: OK. Well, one of the things that we know for a fact is that this is a conversation that has existed even before the United States. Some of the first colonists who came here from Europe were coming here for religious freedom, to escape religious tyranny in Europe. And we know that this was one of the first conversations they had about public life in the United States because it's in the First Amendment.

That was the first thing they changed after they made the Constitution-- "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." And then immediately said, "or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press." So the connection between religion and the media has been a conversation in the United States from our country's ever very beginning, and it's a conversation that's still happening today.

We see conversations around, where does government fit into public life? Where does religion fit into public life? Where does the media fit in public life? And how does the media cover religion? How does the media cover government? Do we do our job correctly in the media covering these issues? What should we be doing differently?

Is our entire system of media doing it wrong? Because there are other forms of media around the world that have different processes than we do when it comes to covering public life, when it comes to covering religion. So it's a conversation that we've been having for our country's entire life.

And you know what? In this entire time, we've never found an answer. This is something we're still talking about, even today. How does media relate to government? How does media relate to religion? How does religion relate to government? It's this ongoing circle that we've never been able to come to an exact answer to.

But we do know it's important to the future of our country and our democracy, because we have written proof in our Constitution that even the founders said, this is important to democracy. So it's an important conversation to have, but I don't know if we've ever found a real answer that we can say, here's where we stand as a people, as a democracy.

HUSSEIN RASHID: Thank you, Jesse. Zeba?

ZEBA KHAN: Yeah. Again, thank you for having all of us today. I just want to echo everything I've heard from my co-panelists. I think what really stuck out for me was what Syreeta said about this sense of-- a homogeneous sense of what religion is in this country dominated by a particular strain within Christianity.

And from where I sit in legacy media, print, but also digital as well, it's thinking about, how do we muddy that sense of a homogeneous idea of what religion is in this country, the way it factors into different decision making, into the work of different people in our society around issues of what might be coming down the pipeline that affects everybody in society.

So a lot of my work on this particular topic is trying to muddy that up. And I'm happy to talk about examples later in the conversation, but being proactive about that because our democracy is, as you stated at the beginning, saying, it's only as strong as it is inclusive, as it includes marginalized voices that historically have been, by design, not allowed in.

So part of the job of the media, whether it's in reporting or seeking out sources or the staff themselves, or in our case, on the opinion section and bringing guest writers, guest voices in is to actively be thinking about this as we think about what our readers need to be engaged with, not just for themselves, but for our country holistically.

HUSSEIN RASHID: Thank you, Zeba. I want to pick up on a couple of threads because I really-- this monolith, this hegemony that Syreeta points us towards. Jesse, you then start telling us this origin story of the United States. And I'm going to use super heroic language because I think it's important because we do see ourselves as a nation. American exceptionalism is real. We do see ourselves of super heroic.

And the connection you make between religion and the First Amendment-- religion, press, and the First Amendment, I have to be honest, hadn't occurred to me before. So I'm really grateful for you bringing that up. But I think it's also important to note that when we look at the history of freedom of religion in this country, it's really about trying to end the wars between Christian groups that were happening in Europe rather than-- and not having them be repeated here in the United States.

So when Jefferson, for example, Thomas Jefferson is talking about freedom of religion, and he says at some point, the Jew and the Muslim and the atheist can be elected to office, he's not actually thinking there will be Jews, Muslims, or atheists in this country. I mean, he's enslaving Muslims on his plantation, so he's not really imagining them as part of the body politic.

And this conversation is really an intra-Christian conversation. Now, thankfully, we seem to have expanded our worldview. And I'd like to pick up that thread, is, how do we expand that worldview? And I think pulling off Zeba's point, I'm from New York.

And a lot of people don't recognize that one of the largest landholders in New York was a guy named van Salee, particularly Brooklyn, what is now Brooklyn, Long Island, and parts of Queens. Van Salee was, in all likelihood, a Muslim. I mean, his grandkids are talking about his Quran and his port-- van Salee is from a port city called Salee, that the largest colonial landowner of Manhattan-- in what is now New York City was, in fact, Muslim.

So telling these more inclusive, these different stories, I think, is one part of that. But what role does the media have to play in that? And when I say media, part of the joy of this panel is that you were cutting across news media and entertainment media. And I want to bring all of that into the conversation.

JESSE HOLLAND: Well, let me just jump in and say, one of the things that we've known from our research of Thomas Jefferson is that what he wrote and what he meant were often different things. And we can say that pretty much about the entire founding fathers of the United States because, remember, those Europeans who left looking for religious freedom had no problem persecuting the Indigenous people and trying to wipe them out, and not just them, and them and their religion.

So even when Thomas Jefferson wrote freedom for America, he wasn't talking about the people he was enslaving at that time or the people who lived on the land that was stolen from them by the original colonists. And that's one of the things that we have to keep in mind when we have this conversation, especially around religion and public life in the United States. The aspirations of the words rarely met the reality of the life at that time.

And that's one of the things that we continue talking about now. How do we get to that more perfect union? Because our words and our actions as Americans rarely matched in the past. The Constitution and the Bill of Rights were great aspirational words, but that wasn't the life that they lived at that time.

And even still today, we sometimes talk about religion. And we talk about government in ways where our words don't match our actions. So there are several civil rights historians who will say, the United States actually first showed up around the civil rights movement because that was the first time the words of our laws or the words of our Constitution actually matched the actions of the people in power.

And that's something we have to think about and work with as we're having these conversations. Do our words match our actions as a country? We say that this is the land of the free. We say we have religious freedom. We say we don't discriminate on the basis of religion. Do our actions actually meet our words?

And how does the media portray our actual actions instead of the aspirational thoughts that we have about religion? That's one of the things that we especially look at in election seasons. Our candidates say they're going to do this. Our candidates say this is what church they go to. Our candidates say this is the religion they actually follow.

Well, do their actions actually meet their words? And is the media correctly portraying their words and their actions? So this is a really big conversation we have in newsrooms and as we present things to the public.

HUSSEIN RASHID: Great. Thank you, Jesse. Zeba, Syreeta, anything to add to that?

SYREETA MCFADDEN: I would say-- I mean, I really love what Jesse said because it's so true to the point of the cognitive dissonance of what it means to be an American. There's beautiful poetry, aspirational language, let's say, a mission statement, a vision statement, if you will, in terms of really trying to make, manifest the values that we purport to have.

And I think it's really important to remember the cognitive dissonance of how we got here. It's important to remember that the founding fathers viewed humanity to be the provenance of the European and not of the Indigenous bands and communities that were already here, certainly the folks that they brought here, and that part, the cognitive dissonance within the faith itself of recognizing the values, merit, and full humanity of other human beings that don't necessarily look like them.

And if that's already caked in, it's natural that, some 248 years later, we would be having-- we would be wrestling with the same kind of question, trying to make sense of who we are and what we're going to do going forward. Yeah.

ZEBA KHAN: And--

HUSSEIN RASHID: Sorry, Zeba. Please go ahead.

ZEBA KHAN: Just to build off of that, thinking about-- exactly concur completely with both Jesse and Zeba on that, thinking about, we say one thing, and we do another, oftentimes. I think there's opportunity there because that's happening. And when we're saying that, we're really talking about people in power, the power structures that control and lay out the formula for what we are, what we're supposed to do.

Well, there's people. There's a community. There's grassroots. Long-standing religious traditions in activism to push for ideals that make us or push for actions by those in power to be more aligned with what they say our values are. And there is room and opportunity, I think, just speaking, thinking about religious communities. And they may not be the ones we know about or give attention to, even within traditions that have a already formalized narrative around them, however accurate or inaccurate.

But there are subgroups within that that are-- or just straight up misinformation about different faith groups who are actively doing that. And when think about in terms of the media, it's our job, not just in the opinion page where I live, but writ large, is to seek out those stories, to share the information that these are things that are actually happening.

The job of the journalist is to find the stories in the context of America, in our American fabric everywhere, wherever they might be. And in the context of religion or finding those things, we're doing that work to share the ideas, to engage readers so that we-- again, we're muddying up what people think is and gives potentially aspirations for what could be.

HUSSEIN RASHID: I really appreciate the attention to power you're bringing to the table, Zeba, because I think that is an underlying thing, is, what are the power and what are the structures that have been embedded here? Which I think everybody is hinting at and calling it out and naming it as really important.

I want to do just a brief digression in history because I want to come back to questions of representation or thinking about questions of representation. We tend to think of the one-drop rule in the United States. Blackness is determined that if, at one point, you had a Black ancestor, you are Black, which is why we talk about, for example, former President Obama as our first Black president, because he was biracial.

But he was, in fact, biracial. He could equally be described white, and we think about that language. That language is an expression of power, who's in, who's out. How do we do it? How do we tell those stories and how our language shapes our vision of the world?

But the idea of the blood quantum, we often think about in the context of the United States going to the period of enslavement. But it actually predates that. It goes back to the Reconquista in the late 1500s, when Isabella and Ferdinand are coming back into the Iberian Peninsula. If you had one drop of Muslim or Jewish blood, you weren't considered-- it wasn't possible for you to be Catholic.

And this became racialized, that whiteness and Catholicism and, at that point, really, Christianity were intimately linked in very explicit ways. And we tend to think about the Muslim ban happening as something in our recent past. But in fact, it was the Spanish who said, do not let any Muslims into our territories, because we're afraid they'll start a revolution and demand freedom. And they were right. The first enslaved rebellions often involved Muslim communities. So there is that part of the narrative that is deeply embedded and that we don't see until we do the deep research.

And so Syreeta, I want to turn to you because one of my favorite pieces of yours that I've read is the piece you wrote about film and representing Black people, because that to me-- and I want to summarize it myself, because I've got you here, so if you want to take a second to summarize it. But to me, it fundamentally altered the way I understand, the way we see representations of the world, not reading, but visually, because it was something that had been invisible to me that you made visible.

And it was paired. And you didn't write it, but somebody at roughly the same time wrote a piece about coloring in comics and how some of the same issues were going on. And Jesse, you may know that piece, but how there were similar issues going on in comics and representations of dark skin in comics. So if you want to talk about that article and what it is that you wrote about.

SYREETA MCFADDEN: All right, so a few years back, I wrote an essay thinking about racism in photography, particularly film stock photography. And what really was the prompt for that for me, what actually really sparked it was a photo taken-- it was New Year's-- taken with mixed company. But it's with the-- all of our digital photography mechanisms, or whatever, is based off of film stock photography.

And what I realized, because the exposure would never balance out with lighter-skinned folks, darker-skinned folks in dark light, you've got your overexposed and your underexposed in the same shot. Like, what a metaphor for America? Anyway. [CHUCKLES]

Anyway, but what-- so I just wanted to think about how it came to be that this technology was the underlying foundation for us perpetuating the same kind of discrepancy in our very future-forward society. And it was just-- it was confusing for me.

But what I came to-- so what I came to learn from writing that piece, it involved unearthing some research from an academic out of Canada looking-- Lorna Roth, looking at her deep study of film stock companies, particularly Kodak and Polaroid, and how everyone thinks technology is infallible. Technology is the neutral place, but yet it is on a-- but it's still built on a superstructure of racial caste.

And it's crazy to folks who are like, but it's tech. It should not have any kind of favor or bias in how it re-represents. But the real thing that I was trying to pull underneath it was also how the camera obscures your identity. Or depending on who is the photographer, how they perceive you is how you are ultimately perceived elsewhere.

So it's the other thing of looking through the viewfinder. You can see your-- and then you see the representation. You are aware-- now you've become made aware of how others see you and how you are othered in that. And granted, the essay doesn't say it all in those kind of terms, but that's really what I was thinking about, which is as how whiteness perceives Blackness and how--

I mean, there's a lot I can also say, too, in a sense of particularly, it was a Black engineer scientist working for Polaroid who also discovered that there was something amiss in the 1970s in terms of how they were functioning, in terms of photography, in terms of exposure, in terms of how they treated darker-skinned people, how Polaroid became instrumental in apartheid in South Africa, in particular with the passbooks, in terms of where the tech was set to such a way to darken dark-skinned people more in order to reinforce the superstructure of the state that reinforced racial caste in apartheid.

So if anything, all I wanted to encourage readers to do was to think deeply about taking better pictures of their friends and compatriots of multiple skin tones and textures, and just being-- and also just being made aware that not all tech is infallible. It is borrowing from other bad iterations of limited thought, isolating thought.

And perhaps, if anything, if it opened your eyes to thinking much more consciously about representation that does not distort or minimize or marginalize others, then my work was done. But thank you for the question, and thank you for bringing up that piece.

HUSSEIN RASHID: I appreciate how you just went into the dive of, it's not the innocuous what were the inherent biases in film stock, but the intentional biases in the ways that then hold up. So we can talk about a cultural bias, a cultural violence that's committed against Black people. But then Polaroid then elevates it to direct violence and emphasizes those structures.

SYREETA MCFADDEN: Yeah, I mean, like, the shadowy story about color photography, color film stock, it's theoretically darker than what I'm letting on. But it also like-- let me put it like this. The technology of color film is thanks to the Germans. And we're talking in a period of thinking about the rise of the Third Reich and the narratives of how they wanted to represent and present their people.

So if you think about why the color photography performed for a shade of skin better over others in as early as the 30's and 40's, then I think you understand a little bit more about even-- even with the technology, there's still-- it's the intent in its usage and how that's worked. I mean, granted, we've made strides in progress in some degree, but-- you know?

HUSSEIN RASHID: Yeah. No, I'm really appreciative of that, Syreeta. Thank you. And when this piece came out, there was also talk about Moonlight, the Oscar-winning film Moonlight and lighting and representations of Black skin in that. So it felt like we were in a cultural moment that unfortunately got quickly swallowed up.

I want to stay on the thread of popular culture. And Jesse, I want to turn to you because you've done so much work in with popular culture characters, with superheroes. You've written about questions of race. Is it directly or indirectly through your representations? And I'd like to hear a little bit about your thinking and how you were depicting characters because your characters are really incredibly complex.

It's not this, oh, if you think Black people are X, let me tell you, they're-- whatever the negative-- they're negative X. Like, no, you're doing the whole alphabet. You're doing A through Z, except X. So I would love to hear a little bit about your process and your thinking about that.

JESSE HOLLAND: Right. Well, one of the things that I-- let's just start from the beginning. I've always been a comic book fan, so I've been reading these comic books my entire life. And I noticed, even as a child, the representations, the few representations there were of African American in Western comic books, in superhero comic books, in romance comic books, even in Archie comic books.

There was always only one or two people who were not white. And if they were Black, they were the sickly shade of purple. If they were Asian, they were this bright color of yellow. If they were Native American or Indigenous, they were this weird color of red, while everyone else would be shaded and normal-looking.

The people who were of color were always colored as the other. And as an other, that was not normal. And even as they we went through the years, people of color were always represented as the help, the sidekick, never the person in charge. And this was really important to the American story because comic books have become the American mythology. It's where we tell our stories of heroes and villains.

And as it seeped into the Hollywood stream, it's now become the way we represent ourselves to the world. And we've never been-- we, as in people of color, have always been the other in the films. We've never been the hero. This is why Black Panther was such a revelation to so many people. Oh my goodness. African Americans can be the hero, which was amazing, that we had this conversation in 2017, that we were still having conversations around people of color not being the other.

And we're still having these conversations today. One of the greatest writers of color in the comic book industry was a man named Dwayne McDuffie, and he made this part of his crusade, to improve the images of people of color by writing us as people, not writing us as Black heroes, not writing us as heroes and some, but just writing us as Americans, as people, as someone you can tell a real story around.

And this is a process that's still ongoing. We're still having conversations around whether Black quarterbacks can be successful. We're still having conversations around whether women can be coaches. We're still having conversations around moving the conversations out of the other into part of the American tapestry. And we can just see some of this creation of the narrative that's still being changed only 10, 15, 20 years ago if we look at the popular culture, if we look at movies.

Everyone was so surprised, when Jordan Peele's Get Out came, that there could be an African American story told in a horror movie. No, it wasn't an African American story. It was an American story being told in a different genre. People were surprised when Wonder Woman was successful, that a woman could be a superhero.

So to me, all of this shows the cracks and flaws in the American narrative that have just been accepted by the American mainstream and the American media. And it's something that we're still trying to repair today. We're still trying to move beyond this today as we continue to tell these stories about ourselves, because that's what entertainment really does. It reveals who we are.

And we can tell what we think about ourselves through the images we put on screen and on the page. And we're still working these issues out, even as we move into the 2025s and the 2030s. We're still trying to figure out who we are as an American people and how we represent ourselves and whether we can actually see ourselves. Or do we still need to continue to tell the American myth that we've been subjected to for the last 200 years?

HUSSEIN RASHID: Jesse, I'm so appreciative of that, that last comment. Do we continue investing in that myth and the idea of creating the other? I think, I've been struggling with something, as more and more-- I'm an educator. I work with students, and I hear people saying, oh, so many kids have ADD. Or they're being diagnosed with some sort of mental health concern, as though the social environment we're in isn't contributing to that.

But also, we tend to talk a lot more-- kids are being diagnosed as neurotypical. But nobody wants to admit that maybe actually, it's not that more kids are being diagnosed as neurotypical. Maybe, actually, a lot more people are just neurotypical.

But we've created a system that only acknowledges and benefits a certain group of people. And we say, that's the normal and that's the standard against we're-- but just even though they may be the minority now. I really think that's a point where we're coming to. Zeba, I want to turn to you.

ZEBA KHAN: Can I just go for it?

HUSSEIN RASHID: Yeah, no, please go for it.

ZEBA KHAN: Both of you had things I wanted to jump in, but what Jesse's talking about-- this is why I think entertainment-- this is not my area, but entertainment, media, and cultural criticism is so important. The mythology that it builds seeps not just in the Hollywood, as Jesse was saying, but it seeps into journalism, into actual reporting.

I mean, immediately, I'm thinking, who is the axis of evil from 10, 20 years ago? Who's the boogeyman, and who's good? And how we define ourselves, but also how we define ourselves in opposition to the other.

And part of that is framing the other as not just us, but bad, specifically, or evil, or whatever it might be. It's just something that just echoed for me. It really comes up every day, even right now, this moment. If you go on to the New York Times or CNN, it's there. That mythology is there. I think we all know that.

SYREETA MCFADDEN: I'm so glad you said that. I just want to jump in, too, because I was thinking so much about what Jesse and Zeba were saying, particularly about these narrative archetypes that exist in our media spaces and how the dominant narrative frame seems to be the thing that we must service in terms of who-- like, if we're still struggling with this conversation about who gets-- what kind of people do we wish to be?

It's not so much, we're not there yet. It's aspirational, the more perfect union. But this constant-- but what feels different about this media environment right now is that you can see the scaffold of the media narratives trying to impose the mythos of America on us. And we're questioning and challenging it with sharper precision, it feels like, in the public square.

ZEBA KHAN: And partly, I think, because the proliferation of different types of media, where we don't have just these top legacy institutions to tell us the story. We have social media. We have people on the ground in different places showing us-- we were talking about before we started Asheville being wiped out. We're seeing, where is government funding going? Where is it not? So that is also complicating the ability of those in power to delineate that framework for us.

JESSE HOLLAND: Which is, by the way, one of the reasons why those in power are so keen to own networks and to own media institutions, because they're beginning to realize, again-- and I'm being specific in saying "again" because the media used to also be owned by only wealthy American tycoons, the Pulitzers. They controlled media in the United States and shaped the narrative for so long. The Spanish-American war was a media creation with a media company, took this country to war to protect its interests.

Now, over the last 100 years, we may have gotten a little bit away from that. But there are many of us who fear we're heading back into that direction, especially as the wealthy few begin to control the form of media that most Americans turn to first today, which is social media. That is being owned by only a select few who have not been successful yet, but who are clearly trying to use these social media outlets to influence government policy and the American narrative.

Even though we may have the appearance of having a free media, which, as a journalist myself, I will say reporters do the best they can. Journalists do the best they can. But when the concentration of power is in only a few hands, especially in a group that owns where most Americans turn to first, which is social media, they have a unprecedented ability now to shape an American narrative, despite what the American people want, despite what the American people are saying.

And it's something we really need to keep our eyes on as we move into the future because while they're dealing with politics now, who says they won't turn to religion next? Who says they will turn to skin color next?

SYREETA MCFADDEN: And who says they won't turn off the tap?

JESSE HOLLAND: Right.

SYREETA MCFADDEN: Right? I mean the-- it's been fascinating to watch these last 15 years or so, of what the-- all right, let's say charitably, 20, maybe 25 if we count Friendster.

[LAUGHTER]

But to watch how these digital spaces for community and connection and communicating across difference and identity and from gender, class, race, and ethnicity, and faith, all these different spaces where folks can actually really expand their worldview, that we're watching this mad dash, rush to try and consolidate, limit, and cut off access, that the really brilliant work of all the content creators and knowledge workers and journalists and academics-- all the ways that we've communicated.

If you don't know this story about America, let me reference-- let me put you in touch with this person who can give you this vision of America or this story of America so that you can understand all the parts, warts and all, and in its full complexity and how quickly we went to banning books in response to that effort.

HUSSEIN RASHID: Yeah. I thank you all. I'm taking extensive notes here. We need another hour just for this last exchange. But Syreeta, what you're saying about diversifying voices comes back to-- Zeba, you made an earlier point about diversifying sources. And I'd love to hear about your experience with-- on the Op-Ed pages, on working to diversify sources and where you're finding-- where it's been successful and where you're finding friction points in that.

ZEBA KHAN: Yeah. I mean, I think it gets to parts of what we've already been discussing. It's how we are-- what is our job in journalism. But again, I'll relegate myself to the opinion page. We're supposed to reflect the voices of the people who live in our area. And in the case of-- and this is, again, too many conversations. I wanted to talk about local journalism versus national. That's a whole other thing.

But in San Francisco Chronicle, where we think about the Bay, and-- in California, to some degree nationally, too, but we really are focused on the Bay in California-- who lives here? And whose voices aren't being heard historically, and how can we change that? And in the context of religion being one of those avenues of voices that we don't typically hear, we hear one version. And it's usually one that most of-- a liberal democratic community that is the Bay, generally, asterisks everywhere, doesn't-- has one idea.

And so when Roe v Wade was under attack, and we knew the likely outcome of SCOTUS was going to come down on, we started having those conversations internally. There's this idea that we have-- this is a-- it's a religious right to-- it offends my ability to have-- even though an abortion, it goes against my religious beliefs. For a particular group of people who dominate the national narrative of what religion is-- collective religions' view is on abortion.

And that's just not true or accurate to different religious communities within Christianity, but also in other faiths as well. So thinking about that, we really made the intention to seek out voices from religious perspectives to talk about the fall of Roe v Wade and how it was actually a flip of that ultimate argument that worked to derail it, that rather for--

In one instance, we had an op-ed by two Jewish writers, I believe a Rabbi and a scholar as well, writing from the Jewish perspective of, this is actually infringement on our religious rights to take away our right to an abortion, from our deep tradition going back our whole rich legacy.

And that piece really went viral within Jewish circles nationally. And I saw it in multiple places and people having conversation and building momentum around it. Now, that's not really our genre of what happens after the piece runs, but that made sense to me in the sense that you're giving legitimacy to a voice, a perspective that is not heard in the norm. That's what the opinion page does, but is definitely part of our fabric as Americans, but doesn't get heard.

And you're giving it legitimacy, and you're also breaking the assumptions people have about religious people through that. And we similarly did the exact same thing. We found a Islamic scholar who was a constitutional lawyer and an Islamic scholar, so she was a powerhouse, and had her write a similar piece from the Islamic perspective. Why is this a problem? Why is the fall of the taking away the right to abortion an infringement on the rights of Muslims in the United States? And did the exact same thing.

Now, those two people don't represent all Jews or all Muslims, but they represent Jews and Muslims. So that for us was an important conversation to have also for people-- largely, the Bay was against the fall of Roe v. Wade, but many other places. So for people to consider, hey, you may have allies as well in your communities that you may not be aware of because you already have assumptions about who they are and how they're going to operate.

So that's an example of thinking about that one aspect. And another aspect I would say to that push was, I remember when we put out the second piece, the Muslim piece. And a commenter said, I didn't expect to have Muslims and Jews teaming up to fight for Roe v. Wade on my bingo card.

And it was funny. But it also told me what I already, which is the assumptions we have about these two communities and how they could never be aligned or they are somehow always in opposition. And that is just not true. I know that personally, and I know that-- I mean, we all know that just from reading and everything else.

So I saw multiple pieces of value in terms of increasing our knowledge collectively about who we are and not who power structures and national narratives tell us we are. And that is the value add I feel we can deal with on hot button issues like that, where we bring in these perspectives.

JESSE HOLLAND: And I have to say, I love hearing stories like that because it's journalists taking the extra step to tell the American story correctly, because many times we in journalism fall into that lazy style of journalism that repeats the same narrative that we've already said that fits into what we think the American story is.

For example, I teach a cultural journalism class here. And unfortunately, I'm not teaching it this semester, because I'm watching the coverage of the flooding in North Carolina and raging at the television because when I'm watching news reports, I see African American and white Americans both affected by flooding.

But when the television reporters interview people about rebuilding, it's only white Americans. When they interview people about needing help, it's white Americans. But when we're panning across the crowd, as people are picking their possessions out of nothing, you see African American faces.

While it's easy-- and as a former reporter, I do understand that we are all on deadline. And we all are trying to get what we need to get the story done that night. But not only white Americans were affected in the mountains of North Carolina. African Americans lived there. Indigenous Americans lived there.

I've yet to see an interview of a single one of those people who live in those mountains, because, as Americans, when we think of mountains and we think of the South, we think of Hatfield and McCoys. We don't think of Indigenous Americans. We don't think of African Americans. We don't think of Asian Americans. So I think when we tell those type of stories, it does require us to take an extra step to make sure we're reflecting the community correctly.

It's easy to find the easy narrative. It's easy for everyone to talk to the same person who rightfully is crying about the loss of life and loss of property in the mountains of North Carolina. But there are more communities there than the stereotype Southern community, the White Southern community.

And I have yet to see those stories reflected in the coverage in the last week. And I keep seeing people of color as background to the white American story, while they're just as affected as the white Americans. They are all Americans were affected there. But I only see representation of stories of white Americans who've lost everything when those communities are much more.

So I love hearing stories about reporters and news organizations taking the extra step to look to reflect the country as it is as a whole, instead of just the narrative we're used to seeing, the same stories that we're telling over and over and over.

ZEBA KHAN: And I think part of that issue, though, is the diversity or the lack thereof in the newsroom. So you have-- I mean, I don't think it's a coincidence that this example I gave you about abortion and Muslims and Jews came from a Muslim editor and my Jewish editor boss. So there's a reason that came up, because we have-- it's not relegated to only, we could have come up with that story.

But there is some-- we bring with-- everyone brings into their newsroom their experiences, their knowledge bases that come from different areas of lived experience and/or whatever work they may have done. And I think that that's an ongoing-- I mean, we all know that, an ongoing issue within the industry.

But that really is part of it. And I think, for me, that always, the example is-- going back to Florida 2016. And maybe we just didn't have enough Latino reporters to realize that Cuban Americans probably weren't going to vote for Dems. And then whoops, we sort of went Trump without any-- with the national media just being completely gobsmacked about it.

SYREETA MCFADDEN: Yeah. I mean, I remember being part of one meeting, editorial meeting when I was working-- when I was a columnist for The Guardian in advance of the 2016 race. And one thing that I kept saying, I'm like, you lack regional diversity here in terms of-- in terms of what you're going to report and cover.

Because what I keep hearing is the same myopic narrative frame about who these communities are. And I think you don't fundamentally understand, particularly the Rust Belt. And you don't understand the Rust Belt in that you're only looking for the same kind of demographic of working white or middle class in a diner.

And I'm like, the Rust Belt is inclusive of so many cities, like Detroit and Gary, Milwaukee, Chicago, Minneapolis. And I'm like, there are huge-- there are diverse communities that exist in within the communities that you are parachuting in and collecting the same narrative quotes that fit into this national narrative box about one particular group set of grievances.

And you're not looking at the entire whole. Like, you're not embedded-- the part of the problem with newsrooms is that you don't-- what would it mean to have an Affrilachian in your newsroom, someone who is African Americans from Appalachia in your newsroom to be able-- like, someone who understands those communities?

And I think they-- I get deadlines. And I'm way familiar with that. But I think it forces a myopia that perpetuates harm. And not being-- I'm not saying it's like, you must be inclusive. But well, I am saying you must be inclusive. I am saying, widen the aperture to think about how you can embed or have better relationships with communities to have reporters embedded so that you can move outside of your comfort zone, especially, in order to cover these stories.

I mean, it makes me think about what the Kerner Commission's Report on race and media from 1968 in response to the 1967 uprising/riots across North, like many urban cities and centers. This is what they were saying. Like, you are not like American media. You are not connected or know or have enough representation across all of our communities and our newsrooms to accurately frame what these conflicts are in a way that doesn't necessarily perpetuate the same old story.

HUSSEIN RASHID: I want to take a second. Thank you, all of you. I want to take a second just to gather some threads and see if it'll spark another round of great thinking here. Jesse, I think you talked about, well, if you're coming after race, what's going to stop them from coming for religion next or more? I think that's already happened because of this conflation between race and religion.

And as I hear you talking about, Why aren't they talking to Black people? part of it is absolutely race. Part of it is also, I would argue, how has Black religion, how has Black Christianity been present in or represented in media? I mean, I think about people going after Jeremiah Wright as not being American, not being Christian. He's a well-known former Reverend at Trinity Church in Chicago.

People quoting Martin Luther King, but only sections that support the White moderate position. It's like, "I hear the speech, but I don't read the letter" sort of disconnect that happens. So it's looking at Blackness as not being related to Christianity. And again, this is this longer history I was pointing to before.

So I think that race and religion are not always interchangeable, but very often in marginalized communities, walking hand-in-hand in terms of why people are being marginalized. And I think, when I think about power and takeover of power, we're talking about what might be happening on X now or what we see happening on X Now.

But I'm hoping you all remember Vine, which was the short six-second video service that Twitter bought and took over. And Vine was the place for Black culture in the United States where it was like, it took-- as a video platform, it was a representation, an archive of Black culture that was shut down and lost.

As Black Twitter is being shut down, Hulu is running a documentary on the impact it had on culture. Like, these spaces-- and I wouldn't even suggest they're transgressive, but they're spaces where these hidden transcripts where people are talking about their communities in their language that is comfortable to those communities, whether that's Black Twitter or Muslim Twitter or Vines or on Facebook at one point, that those are being effaced because that visibleness, unless it can be corporatized and taken over, is effaced and removed in some capacity.

I think the scale of it is changing, but I think this has antecedents. And I think where this brings me-- and you can feel free to comment on anything I've said. But the question I want to pose to you, all the questions posed to you all is, what does it mean when we have segmented media markets?

And Zeba started this conversation a little bit, and Jesse started this conversation a little bit. But what does it mean when we have segmented media markets? When we're not-- I grew up, and I think I feel confident saying you all did, too-- but correct me if I'm wrong-- that we all grew up in the age of three networks. And we remember when networks 4 and 5 appeared, and then streaming appeared.

And radio networks-- you could drive through the country, and every 10 miles would be a new radio station on the same frequency on your radio. And we've had this-- on radio, we've had this massive consolidation. On visual media, we've had this massive segmentation. Can we even imagine ourselves as part of the same country? Are we even talking the same language anymore?

JESSE HOLLAND: Well, I'll just say that I actually remember when television turned off at night when they had-- when they played the national anthem, and there was nothing but static until the next morning. But that tells you how old I am.

But this is a conversation that I actually have had a lot, especially in the last five years, because I think when we had consolidated media, when there were only CBS, NBC, ABC, and PBS, we were able to tell ourselves that we had a national narrative that everyone believed, even though I don't think it was ever true. I think that national narrative left out too many people for us to believe that the majority of Americans believed it.

But that was a national narrative that could be controlled simply because of lack of diversity in media, not diversity as in skin. But there were only four networks. There were only two or three national newspapers. There were only two or three national magazines. Everybody read Time, Life, Newsweek. And the narrative was able to be controlled by the few, especially on television.

Now, today, like you said, you can turn on your YouTube, or you can turn on a streaming service. And you can get a hundred different opinions of what American life is like. But I think the main difference now is that the things that were said inside houses, inside mosques, inside temples, inside barbershops, inside beauty salons are now public.

The conversation's going on in the public instead of behind closed doors, and we're all having to reconcile the fact that we don't think the same. But there is still a shared set of values that make us Americans, whether it's belief in federal government, whether it's belief in state government, whether it's belief in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. But that might be the only thing we all agree on. And all of us might not agree on that, as we saw from the insurrection.

All of us might not agree on that. So we're having to reevaluate what makes us Americans, what keeps us together as a country. What are our values as a country? What are our morals as a country? What makes us Americans and not Canadians or Mexicans? Are we one continent of North America that shares the same values? What makes us different from everybody else?

I don't think there's ever been an answer to that question. It's something that we're still trying to figure out. In the 200th-plus year of our current democracy, we're still trying to figure that question out. There's no answer to it, but we all know we have something in common. We just haven't yet figured out how we get to that thing we have in common versus all the things that separate us.

SYREETA MCFADDEN: The thing that I want to pick up on, if I really love just everything you were just saying there, Jesse. I feel like, this idea about-- at least this was what we said when guess when we were younger and all that. America is a young country. It's a young democracy. The constant narrative principle about US identity is that no nation like this has ever existed on the Earth, a pluralistic, representative democracy in theory.

And I think about back, from 16 years to the Obama presidency in election. And there was a moment there where it was like-- where it got-- the way that he communicated to us, our American story, it felt like probably the first time a politician speaking to Americans as if we're adults and not children, really young in the concept and understanding of what it means to be one nation complete.

And it does make perfect sense to have this conversation and constantly wrestle with the question about, who are we really? And what values do we want to protect and hold dear? I mean, Americans holistically understand our symbols and principles about the American mythos and story. We understand in theory and principles about what the Constitution says in the Bill of Rights and a lot of our founding documents.

But not everyone understood-- but the misunderstanding is obviously in a sense of how folks talk about-- use the words of it and use the words of it to defend the indefensible, like January 6. And I think we're in our middle age.

Is that what's happening now? Is America middle-aged as a nation? Are we really trying to work through what our next 250 years might look like in a sense of being really honest in our accounting of who we were before and focus on who we can become?

ZEBA KHAN: And just I'd--

JESSE HOLLAND: All spying on us having a midlife crisis as a country.

ZEBA KHAN: Just to add just briefly, thinking, just reflecting on both of your comments, just to figure out who you are and are those values also shifting, too. We thought we were one thing, and we may have been to some degree. But everything is in flux, I think, partly because we're so connected, partly because we're getting information from everywhere, breaking down stereotypes, breaking down power narratives. So that's another thing as well, thinking about.

SYREETA MCFADDEN: And a language point. You brought up language, right, Hussein?

HUSSEIN RASHID: Yeah.

SYREETA MCFADDEN: And it was Toni Morrison who's thinking really pushed me in terms of thinking about how the language is so caked with power-- systems of power, racism, and hegemony is all in the language, and how it's in the air and how the last few years felt like moments where we were trying to challenge and stretch and bend language to not necessarily hold us into these boxes and paradigms.

So yeah, it makes sense that the language is-- the language we've had to talk about ourselves has been limiting for a while.

HUSSEIN RASHID: It's time for a new language.

JESSE HOLLAND: And one thing that I always think about, especially when I think about the Supreme Court and Congress and the president, is that since the ratification of the Constitution, we've been trying to bend the language of the Constitution to move beyond what it was designed for, white landowners. And we've never actually gone back and changed the language.

We've tried to-- we have the whole theory of originalism. We should only do what the founders intended to do, and we have some people talking about textualism and the living Constitution versus the original Constitution. But really, we're operating a government. We're operating a way of life in a diversified country under language that was not designed for that.

In the same way, by the way, it's the same thing for religion. Most of the religious documents that current religions work under were written hundreds of years ago, but we're trying to make our current lives fit into a language that wasn't designed for it. So we're trying to make sure-- when we talk about language, we have to keep in mind that some of our most important documents as human beings were never anticipating the lives that we live now.

And we're trying to force, sometimes, a square into a circle to hold allegiance to a document that wasn't designed for that, especially when we talk about the Constitution, especially when we talk about the Bill of Rights, especially when we talk about the founding documents of this country. They never anticipated a panel that looked like this.

They never anticipated that Muslims and Jews and Haitians and Indigenous people would be part of government. They never anticipated women would be part of government. So we're always trying to shove our modern sensibilities into a document, the Constitution that wasn't designed for it. Yet, we're still-- and this includes religion, as well as government.

We're still holding allegiance-- trying to say, trying to hold allegiance to documents that couldn't anticipate the lives that we lead now and the country we live in now. And there's going to be-- I hate to say, it's going to be a breaking point in that eventually because there-- George Washington would not recognize the country we live in now. And the question is always, is that good or bad?

Because the language and the life that our founding fathers lived looks nothing like the language, the life, and the country we live in now. Yet, we're still continually trying to shove our modern problems into documents that didn't anticipate anything beyond the colonial life.

HUSSEIN RASHID: Jesse, I want to thank you for that. And I think what I'm hearing from you is also that there is a-- there's a binary thinking. Like, are these documents immutable and correct and eternal as they are? Or is there an intent and aspiration that should be animating and motivating us? And then a binary on those who want to preserve the literalism-- and I'm going to use that in scare quotes because I do think that's deeply problematic as well-- but really, as a way to preserve power as opposed giving up that power.

I want to do-- we're coming to the end of our time. I want to do a lightning round with you all. And there's one question in our Q&A that I want to paraphrase and throw out to you. Before I do that, on the power of language, I want to come to a contemporary example.

And Zeba, I'm going to turn to you because you had an op-ed in-- I think it was The Boston Globe where you really used language, and you were talking about how we use language, impacts our foreign policy. I don't know if you want to take a second to talk about that one.

ZEBA KHAN: Yeah, sure. I think that was in 2014 or 2015. But the whole premise of the argument was looking at the way we use language is power. And when we talked about this a lot, it has a framing power as well. And we were talking a lot about ISIS at the time. It was at the top of the news everywhere constantly, nationally.

And I was looking at that and just reading it as somebody who studied the Middle East, who lived in the Middle East, and then thought about these things a lot and was on policy with the Middle East and media. So these are my areas in looking at it. And we were digging into their history as an organization and looking at that and noticing they had changed their name five times in maybe like-- I'm not accurate, but five times in seven years.

And I'm like, that's odd. That's odd because not only do they change it so many times, they're really brand conscious, is what I came away with. I'm like, that's such an odd thing for a terrorist organization to be brand conscious, but they are really thinking about language. And the second thing I noticed was their name went from Arabic to English. And so oh, you weren't actually talking to people, even those are the people that you were committing egregious acts of horrific violence on. You're talking to the West.

And so thinking about that and legitimacy of language, and the argument of the piece was essentially, let's not call them what they want to be called. They're trying to establish themselves as an Islamic State when they are, in fact, neither Islamic, nor are they a state. And so I marshaled evidence, both in terms of American leadership and Muslim scholars around the world who all said, no, we're neither one of those things.

So why are we calling them what they want to be called and giving them that legitimacy? We don't have to. And we being, I was talking to the United States, specifically the US government in that piece, but more broadly in the media, more broadly around the world, here in the Middle East, wherever. We don't have to do that because that only reinforces what they're trying to communicate to the world around them, that they are legitimate, when, in fact, they aren't.

And so that ended up having a lot of viral-- and Secretary Kerry actually started using the word or the acronym Daesh, which is what I argued for in the piece. It's not mine. It comes from-- I think the first people to use it were Syrian fighters who were fighting against them because it's an acronym that really suggests something's off about the-- Arabic acronyms aren't as common. And so it's off in its own sound. It doesn't sound natural.

But it also plays on Arabic-- intricacies of Arabic language, and it can suggest things that are demeaning to that organization, something to be trampled, for example. And they were aware of that, too. And when that word was being used in the Middle East, they put out a threat to say they would cut people's tongues out if you used it.

So they knew how serious it was. The fact that they thought it was that serious, I argued, we needed to take it that serious for the exact same reason in reverse. So that's what that piece was about. And it sort of-- it made it crystallized for me, yeah, that one specific instance. But language absolutely affects the way we think.

And in the context of-- I'll think about US and Muslims globally, the stereotypes that we have had in our nation's psyche since our inception or even before. And you look at it just to tie in to some of these other things that we've talked about, film. We know, going back to-- there was a famous study from Jack Shaheen, the late scholar, who looked at a thousand films from, I believe, 1896 to 2000, and in a thousand films, found 12 where-- a thousand films that had Muslims or Arabs in the film. And only 12 of them were positive.

So if you think about that over generations and centuries of what we have to deal with, it actually completely-- entertainment's seeping into our mythology, seeping into not just our journalism, but into our policy, and potentially making it harder for us to achieve solutions that are ideally just solutions, not just for us, but for everyone.

HUSSEIN RASHID: Thank you, Zeba. OK, lightning round question for you all. We are committed to not just talking about issues, but thinking about how people can engage with this on their own once they're done with this session. So tell me, what's one bit of advice, one bit of thing you would tell our audience that they can do to take control of the story and the narrative? How to engage with what you're talking about-- let me put it that way, because I don't need anybody-- we don't need a thousand zines at the end of today.

JESSE HOLLAND: What I would say immediately is the one thing they can do is to understand the narrative and to be able to see it. And to do that, you have to expand the intake of information that the normal American gets. The normal American takes in information from whatever their favorite flavor of news that agrees with them.

In the past, we used to take in information from what used to be called neutral sources. But now we take in information given to us by an algorithm that will send us things that only agree with us or send us things that will outrage us and keep us on that particular site. We need to start diversifying and increasing our news sources and then being clear and trying to understand the narrative behind those news sources.

Once you start reading between the lines, and I hate to-- I almost sound like a conspiracy theorist. I hate to say, but once you start thinking about why they're telling you what they're telling you, you can begin to see and control the narrative of the story that's being told to you.

I have students always ask me, well, what newspaper do you read every day? Well, I don't read a newspaper. I read several versions of the same story written by several different reporters because I think the truth of what happened is somewhere in the middle. So that's the one thing I would suggest for people, that if you want to control the narrative, first you must understand it. And you can't understand it without doing more research, more reading.

HUSSEIN RASHID: Thank you, Jesse. I love the fact that you point out that simply because we're readers, doesn't mean we're passive. We can be active and control that narrative. Zeba, you're off mic. What would you suggest? You're off mute, I should say.

ZEBA KHAN: Building off of that, Jesse's point, we're not-- readers are not just passive, they're active, they can also actively write. I'm an editor in an opinion page. There are opinion pages everywhere individually and [? legacy ?] outlets, nationally, but also locally. I want to plug for local. I cannot emphasize enough how important local media is in all of this.

Ultimately, everything is local. And so I think some of the most compelling opportunities are at your local level, in your neighborhood, in your town, in your city. So I would encourage people to think about sharing your voice. Write. Share your op-eds. And obviously, op-eds aren't the only thing. There are other ways, videos and podcasts and things like that.

But a source I will plug because I'm intimately aware of it and have worked with them for a long time is the Op-Ed Project, which is a social venture that aims to diversify thought leadership platforms. It's called the Op-Ed Project. They have a website. They have public workshops.

It's not free, but nobody is turned away for financial reasons. They do have scholarships, so I encourage you to check them out. And they also have just basic information on their website to how you would craft an argument for the ideas and causes that you want to advocate for. So that would be my first piece of advice.

And my second one to the local is get to know your neighbors. It seems really simple. But I encourage people to go out. And if you are a part of one particular-- in the context of religion, if you're part of the Jewish tradition, go meet the Hindu temple. Go, go, go to the India festival at the Hindu temple. Go meet with members of the mosque, of the local mosque, or one of them.

There's so much that is-- again, this conversation we're having that there's so much of a homogeneous narrative that is being pushed on all of us about everyone else. A lot of that is misinformation, inaccurate, and you can dispel a lot of it just by going and actually meeting people in your town who are different from you.

It enriches everyone's lives, and I would argue, enriches the fabric of this democracy when we are all that connected. And all the more, to Jesse's point of being able to discern, what is-- our accurate objective reporting, what is biased, and what has an agenda? The more you [INAUDIBLE], the more you're able to discern that as well. So it also feeds into that.

HUSSEIN RASHID: Thank you, Syreeta.

SYREETA MCFADDEN: I have to agree with both of my panelists wholeheartedly. Those are definitely both practices that I actually do and definitely have recommended to my students. You want to do corporeal politics, which is basically, get in communities. Be around folks. Have the conversation.

I would say, probably-- the other thing I would say is check your-- well, not check your biases. But more like, how do you step out of that? Is to look at what your blind spots are of various communities and their narratives. So if you realize you're getting what feels like a limited, singular sourcing of a perspective in terms of if it's an issue around the economy, then talk to people across classes.

If it's around gender, try to find sources and people who can talk, who can speak to the complexity of gender and gender politics and how it might affect the social, political, economic, faith-based issue. Age diversity-- I mean, you're talking to yourselves, to your peer group. But also, go upwards, downwards, wide.

Cast a bigger net. You will discover-- and just in the course of open-ended trust, safe conversation, that you might find points of commonality, but directions for further investigation. So that's what I would say.

HUSSEIN RASHID: Thank you, all. There is a question that has come up from Chris that I'm going to paraphrase a little bit, but I think it's actually sort of been addressed through the course of the conversation. So I want to try to sum up some of the points that I think are relevant.

Chris, if you're still online and you feel I'm not doing justice to your question, please feel free to jump back into the Q&A. But Chris starts out by talking about, there's a particular narrative, particularly of Christianity, that's dominated news media in particular, which is white, exclusionary, evangelical thinking.

And I want to be clear. There are also groups like Jim Wallis's group or Richard Cizik's group that are much more inclusive in their evangelicalism. And so this has dominated the airwaves. How do we counter that when nobody really is into theological debate? Somebody is going to tune into to a show to watch a theological debate. That's what we have segmented media for.

So how do we combat some of that exclusionary idea or complicate the narrative of Christianity in the US? So it's not, I don't want to fall into a trap either of this being a binary, there's a good Christianity, there's a bad Christianity. These are all expressions of Christianity. But how do we complicate those narratives of Christianity?

And also, how do we bring in other religions into public discourse in ways that are representative? And I think you all have touched on that in very different ways. And so I want to try to sum it up in the interest of time. But again, feel free if you want to chime in quickly after.

But I think the complex characterizations that Jesse spoke about in his work-- so human beings are not only one thing. How do we break past those simplified framings? How do we look for complex characterizations? Then we can talk about diversifying sources. And what do you find accidentally?

One of the great short documentaries that I think illustrates this is called Bronx Princess, which is about a West African girl who's living in the Bronx. And the documentary filmmaker is following her, and he goes to her village in Africa, where her father is a chieftain. And she's the Princess.

And you find out she's Muslim. And he's like-- he didn't know that until the documentary was going on. You want to tell a human story, and all these other elements then start popping up through this. And I think that's how we tell the complexity of a human story, so not to preclude religion, not to preclude race. But don't necessarily always lead with that either, because there are intersections that actually make your story deeper when people are tuned in for a human story. And they're getting that human complexity in there.

And I think, Syreeta, what you did for us in terms of really helping us think through some of the invisible-- pointing out some of the invisible structures that allow us to question-- you were talking in terms of film stock. But I think we can always ask, what are the invisible things that went into-- what are the assumptions that went into making this story? And do any of these assumptions-- do any of the results of these assumptions start feel off to me?

Are there ways that I can go back and think about, well, what else might be off in this narrative? And so I feel like all brought this up in really meaningful ways. It just wasn't strung together in response to this question, but I think the underlying work is there. So I really, really appreciate the depth of this conversation. I don't see Chris yelling at me in the Q&A, so we'll assume it's good. Jesse, did you want to chime in?

JESSE HOLLAND: Yeah, I'll just jump in quickly just to throw another curveball, which is, is it the responsibility of journalism to referee what should be an internal conversation inside of religion? Is it our responsibility to actually referee or expose the fractures inside a religion that is the dominant religion in the country? I can argue that both ways because Christianity is still the dominant religion in the United States and affects more government and public life than anything else.

But is it true? But it's also, there's a question of, how much involvement is media responsible for in talking about what should be internal conversations inside religions? But don't have the answer to either one of those questions, but I think it's worth asking.

HUSSEIN RASHID: Appreciate that.

ZEBA KHAN: I just wanted to echo saying what you said, just-- so the answer to the question, that my initial response was, the personal universals in the particular-- your personal narratives can be quite effective at wanting to complicate the narrative around, in this case, of this question of Christianity. We run a lot-- when it comes to religious pieces, we do run a lot of personal narratives, people who are scholars or just practitioners.

We don't run a lot of them. But when we do, they are that. We had a really powerful piece that actually won an award in California for a new category of the California News Publishers Association, which is our oldest news association in California, has a new category for religion and writing, which also indicates something about the awareness in the industry about religion's role in media.

But we had an essay that was a finalist for that. And it was a young person, which is another diversity that we don't talk too much about in terms of our spaces, a teenager, a Muslim teenager who experienced going through cancer, and then in remission, talked about how they couldn't fast, because it was Ramadan, and struggling with the narrative of-- recovery from the experience of going through cancer, and also staying true to their religious ideals, and how that all mixed together. It was really quite a lovely piece.

But it's very specific. It's unapologetically specific to that person and their experience, and I think that is the power of that narrative. So these to complicating these bigger narratives that we have about different people and structures.

HUSSEIN RASHID: OK, thank you, all. This has been such an enlightening conversation. I'm grateful for your time. I'm humbled by your knowledge. Really, thank you. And we look forward to being in conversation in the future.

Our next webinar is going to be on Tuesday, October 15, in two weeks about reproductive health care access and white nationalism with Twanna Hines of Funky Brown Chic and Melissa Deckman of PRRI, a polling institute focusing on religion. Please make sure you register, and information is posted in the chat. Thank you, all.

SPEAKER 2: Sponsor-- Religion and Public Life.

SPEAKER 1: Copyright 2024 The President and Fellows of Harvard College.