WALLACE HOUSE JOURNAL Spring 2018 Volume 28 | No. 1 Sidelined How being unable to report allowed for a front row seat Photo Credit: MLive Media Group/The Ann Arbor News, Junfu Han BY MATT HIGGINS ‘18 Some members of the Michigan football team chose to raise fists as a form of self-expression during the national anthem prior to the ate on a Saturday night last September, an email arrived from Penn State game last season. L Jason Stallman, sports editor at The New York Times: Could I help with NFL reporting the following day? Terms of the fellowship prevented me from working, so as editors scrambled for coverage, I was sidelined. Any misgivings about On Friday, President Donald Trump had inveighed against the not being able to cover a big, breaking story were soon allayed as NFL, targeting players who refused to stand during the national #TakeAKnee came to the U-M campus, granting me a front-row anthem in protest of social injustice and against police shootings seat to a continuing dispute over the first amendment. of unarmed black men. With no pressure to produce hot takes on Trump, I had the time to “Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners, when explore how the movement and the resulting clampdown somebody disrespects our flag, to say: ‘Get that son of a on expression from authorities was part of a continuum in bitch off the field right now,’” Trump said at a rally for Alabama Senate candidate Luther Strange. “‘Out. He’s which sports serve as a platform for human rights protests. fired. He’s fired!’” Trump encouraged fans to leave the Days after Trump’s broadside, Dana Greene Jr., a first- stadium if a player knelt during the anthem. The NFL’s year master’s student in U-M’s School of Public Health, weekly Sunday schedule was about to become a sideshow took a knee in the center of the campus diag for 20 hours to a president’s attempt at regulating speech. in solidarity with NFL players, and to support, he said, On social media, #TakeAKneee – a hashtag supporting “every student on this campus that has ever felt that they didn’t quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s protest effort to draw attention to belong here.” violent policing – pitted freedom of expression versus patriotism amid discussions about the place for politics in sports. Earlier in the month, name tags of black students in the West Quad dorm buildings had been defaced, one with a racist slur. Three weeks earlier, my family and I moved from Buffalo, N.Y., to Ann Arbor to join the Knight-Wallace Fellowship Class of 2018. CONTINUED ON BACK PAGE Who knows why I was reading Hannah Arendt, crispness of the assessment from this woman who shaped much the German-born political philosopher, of our modern thought on “active citizenship” spoke to me. Her in the middle of the night. I was sleepless words pushed and inspired me throughout the academic year. and restless, troubled by thoughts about It is tempting to think of Wallace House as a passive resource. cults of personality. We are a journalism organization devoted not to creating news, but to supporting the careers of journalists who do. But our My laptop was too close by, distance from the day to day of the news business actually allows and so I reached for it and fell us to play a more engaged role in encouraging informed and active down a digital rabbit hole. In my citizenship. fretting over politics, I stumbled upon Arendt and her clear-eyed For many, engagement has come to mean consuming more and assessment on the necessity of reacting more. For Wallace House, engagement must mean journalism. resisting reactionary tendencies. It must mean interacting more, conversing more, moderating more, thinking more and listening In a mid-70s interview with more. Certainly journalists are not and should not be activists. the French writer Roger Errera But that doesn’t exempt us from being active citizens. And it excerpted in 1978 for the New York Review of Books, Arendt said: doesn’t exempt Wallace House from stepping into the fray by using journalism to foster active civic engagement. “ The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other In this issue of the Wallace House Journal, you’ll see how that dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can active stance took shape over the past academic year. In a time you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody when it’s tempting to lie awake at night worrying that “nobody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the believes anything any longer,” we did our part to keep at least a lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer.” few people believing in the power of journalism. It’s not a strikingly original observation. Similar thoughts on the requisite role of a free press in an American context date back to the founders. But at 2 a.m. in the busy days of the fall term, the Stand Up and Introduce Yourself BY KYNDALL FLOWERS I’ve been working part-time at from the heavens. “I don’t know who that is!” I’d yell back in Wallace House for the past several my head to an empty sky. But every week, I got to try again. I’d months. At 19, I am on a gap year be a poet one week, a freelancer the next, and after seeing my between high school in Ann Arbor friends’ band play, I became someone interested in music scene and college at Howard University in politics. Some weeks I noted that I worked as a literary arts intern, Washington, D.C. A performance others at a gallery downtown. And the introductions let me claim poet and writer, I am interested everything. I had autonomy over how I was seen for about ten seconds, twice a week. I could drop what felt weird and say what in both creative writing and felt right and then try again, each time a little prouder than before. journalism. In mid-October, while most of my friends were getting This opportunity isn’t often offered to teen girls, and I’m thankful their feet wet as college freshmen, I got to experience it at Wallace House. It was nice to realize that I reached out to Lynette by email with my high school resume many of the Fellows are also still practicing how to occupy all and a bold idea to fill my days and my active mind by somehow of the space they deserve. It’s nice to know that these urges to engaging with the work of Wallace House. reinvent myself, to see what fits and and shed what doesn’t, and to keep repeating the process, isn’t a side-effect of some wild, Hitting send on that email secured me a rare spot as a Knight- angsty youth. We’re all just trying to get comfortable. Wallace “Junior Fellow.” In exchange for working to update the Wallace House database, I got to stick around on seminar days and I started my gap year chest deep in an identity crisis. I’d planned observe the journalists and speakers moving through the space. on travelling, embarking on some great adventure that did not Like all of the Fellows, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I’d think about include Michigan. I started at Wallace House to prove to myself different ways to introduce myself to the speaker, and then I’d that I could have a life-changing gap year without some expensive stand up and tell those in the room who I was. program abroad. The Knight-Wallace Fellowship gave me exactly that. The next time someone asks me who I am, I will respond The introductions served as a sort of constant re-inventing. knowing I may have a different answer next week, and I’ll find “Remember who you are,” The Lion King’s Mufasa echoed to me steadiness in that perpetual reinvention. 2 WALLACE HOUSE JOURNAL 2018-2019 KNIGHT-WALLACE FELLOWS 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 1 Itai Anghel 6 Anders Kelto 10 Aaron Nelsen 14 Stephen Ssenkaaba Correspondent and Creator and Senior Producer, Rio Grande Valley Bureau Contributing Editor and Senior Documentary Filmmaker, “GameBreaker with Keith Chief, San Antonio Express- Features Writer, The New Israeli TV, Channel 2 Olbermann,” Audible News Vision Printing and Publishing Tel Aviv, Israel Ann Arbor, Mich. Rio Grande Valley, Texas Company Study Plan: Tribalism and the Study Plan: The connection Study Plan: The effect of Kampala, Uganda politics of fear in the Middle between sports and social militarization on communities Study Plan: Inclusive online East following the Arab movements along the U.S.-Mexico border news strategies for emerging revolutions news markets 7 Fredrik Laurin 11 Daigo Oliva 2 Michelle Bloom Special Projects Editor for Deputy Photo Editor, Folha de 15 Jawad Sukhanyar Senior Designer, Politico Current Affairs, SVT (Swedish São Paulo Reporter, The New York Times Alexandria, Va. Television) São Paulo, Brazil Kabul, Afghanistan Study Plan: Visual storytelling Stockholm, Sweden Study Plan: New ways to Study Plan: Afghan women’s through social media Study Plan: Exploring and publish image-driven narratives issues in the global context developing tools to protect 3 Seungjin Choi news content from digital 12 Ben Penn 16 Luis Trelles Reporter, Maeil Business manipulation Labor and Employment Producer, Radio Ambulante Newspaper Reporter, Bloomberg Law San Juan, Puerto Rico Seoul, South Korea 8 Catherine Mackie Washington, D.C.