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What Does America Stand For? We Asked Teenagers

Author: Anna North


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Beginning in early 2017, I began asking teenagers around the country to make videos in which they responded to the following question: “What are your values as a person? What are American values? Do you think the country is living up to those values today? Why or why not?” Their answers have a new urgency in the wake of the violence in Charlottesville, Va., which has brought lingering questions about America’s past, present and future to the forefront of the national conversation.

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The footage in the video above was all submitted before the rally in Charlottesville. I was inspired to collect it by my conversations with young people in the months following the 2016 election. It started with an election-week experiment — I wanted to hear what first-time voters in Pennsylvania had to say about starting their voting lives in what already felt, to me, like a historically bizarre time. In the weeks that followed, I talked to young protesters, youth reporters at a local newspaper and teenage environmental activists.

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Adults often dismiss teenagers, assuming that they’re callow, apathetic or uninformed. But the kids I was meeting cared passionately about education, foreign policy, racial justice and more. Even when they weren’t sure how they felt about a certain candidate or issue, they were clearly thinking deeply.

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Struck by what I’d heard, I decided to solicit young people’s opinions in a more systematic way, to paint a picture of how their generation sees the country today. That’s how this collection of personal videos came about.

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I wrote to dozens of teenagers — young people I’d met at protests, young Republicans I’d talked to around Election Day, teenagers who were already vlogging about their high school experiences on YouTube. I also reached out to Christian youth groups, home-schooling associations, L.G.B.T. rights organizations, groups representing Native American youth and many other organizations, asking them to recommend young people who might want to participate.

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My goal was to pull together a group that was diverse in as many ways as possible: geographically, politically and in terms of race, gender and sexual orientation. Not everyone said yes — one teenager wrote to me that “Trump could learn from President Putin how to deal with ‘journalists’ like yourself.” But in the end, I got more than 30 videos in which teenagers talked about their values. Some of them also agreed to submit follow-up videos in which they told me more about the communities where they lived.

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The video above contains a sampling of the videos the teenagers submitted. It’s not as scientific or wide-ranging as a poll or a survey. Instead, think of it as a kind of preview: This is how our country looks today to some of the young people who will help decide its future.

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Anna North (@annanorthtweets) is a journalist and novelist.

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Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.

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DMU Timestamp: February 08, 2018 18:47

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