The Washington Post - USA (2022-02-22)

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 22 , 2022. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE C3

awarded the Polk prize for na-
tional reporting, was launched
last spring after Congress failed
to create a bipartisan investiga-
tive commission. The three-part
series “makes clear that the vio-
lence that day was neither a
spontaneous act nor an isolated
event,” Washington Post Execu-
tive Editor Sally Buzbee wrote in
a letter to readers.
The Post also won a Polk
Award for technology reporting,
shared with the Guardian U.S.
and Forbidden Stories, for “The
Pegasus Project,” which revealed
how spyware sold to govern-
ments by the private Israeli firm
NSO Group for the purposes of
tracking terrorists and criminals
was used to hack cellphones
belonging to journalists, human
rights activists and others. Those
targeted include two women
close to Jamal Khashoggi, the
assassinated Saudi journalist
and contributing Washington
Post columnist.
That reporting came out of
data accessed by nonprofit For-
bidden Stories and human rights
group Amnesty International
that was shared with and ana-
lyzed by news organizations
worldwide.
The Polk Awards also honored
journalism from the New York
Times and CNN related to the
U.S. withdrawal from Afghani-
stan and Kabul’s fall to the Ta li-
ban; journalists with ABC News
and the New Yorker for examin-
ing climate change’s far-reaching
impacts for the most vulnerable
people; and the Wall Street Jour-
nal’s blockbuster investigation
into leaked Facebook documents.
Notably missing: reporting on
the coronavirus pandemic,
which dominated much of the
previous year’s winning journal-
ism.
Housed by Long Island Uni-
versity, the Polk Awards received
610 submissions this year, a rec-
ord number. They came from “far
more sources of investigative re-
porting than ever before,” awards
curator John Darnton said in a
statement. “This speaks to the
vitality and continued promise of
a changing journalism landscape

POLK FROM C1

Coverage of

Jan. 6 gets

Polk A ward

BY JULIANNE MCSHANE

Last month, after nearly two
years of parenting in a pandemic,
Morgan Burke was angry.
Her days had been spent at
home, she said, the hours divided
up among cooking for her three
children, cleaning up their messes
and doing their laundry while her
husband did his paid work up-
stairs.
Her stress has been acute since
the start of the pandemic: Burke,
35, and her whole family — in-
cluding her older two kids, now 7
and 4 — had coronavirus symp-
toms in March 2020, before tests
were widely available, when they
were just a few days into what was
supposed to be a week-long Flori-
da vacation. Burke, who lives in
the Charlestown neighborhood of
Boston, was seven months preg-
nant at the time, so “we stayed for
six months and had a baby in
Florida,” she said.
Since then, she said, her quest
for any return to normalcy has
proved elusive. Her return to
work as a part-time home orga-
nizer, planned for the beginning
of January, has been delayed fol-
lowing her husband’s recent bout
with covid-19 and her 20-month-
old son’s belated return to day
care after a classmate contracted
the virus, she said.
So when her friend Sarah Har-
mon, a 39-year-old therapist who
also lives in Charlestown, invited
her to join a group of local moms
that planned to scream their pan-
demic-induced frustrations into
the frigid evening air last month,
Burke reluctantly agreed to join.
On Jan. 13, Burke, Harmon and
more than a dozen other mothers
met on the 50-yard line of a local
football field. Harmon opened the
event with a greeting and prompt-
ed the women to check in with
how their stress felt in their bod-
ies.
Then, they screamed.
For Burke, it was exactly what
she didn’t know she needed.
“It felt good to be able to be out
of control,” she said. “We have
been holding this tight leash on
everything we could possibly con-
trol during these two years.”
That was exactly the point,
Harmon said.
Two years of working with
mothers struggling with their
mental health — t hrough both her
private practice and her company

the School of Mom, which offers mindfulness programs for mothers — had shown her that many mothers were at their breaking points, and that people and insti- tutions around them often weren’t offering enough support, she said. Harmon hosted her first primal scream event in March 2021. While that one passed without much fanfare, word of last month’s e vent spread q uickly. As a result, primal scream events — many hashtagged #MomScream — soon popped up in New Or- leans, Alaska and New Jersey. More are planned in the weeks to come, in Virginia and New Jersey. The events started becoming so popular that Harmon released a guide with tips on how moms can plan their own scream events. Moms have a lot to be angry about: More than 1 million women who have left the labor force since February 2020 have yet to return, and Black and Latina women have been hit hardest with job losses over the course of the pandemic. Some of those were mothers who stopped doing paid work — in part to manage child care in the wake of mass school and day-care closures — and

many have faced hurdles as they’ve tried to rejoin the labor force. Experts say the proliferation of primal scream events highlights the paradoxical position mothers occupy in American society, particularly during the pandemic: They’re overburdened and under- supported when it comes to domestic and care work, but left without many models of how to express their anger about those inequities. When they do express anger, they’re often seen as rein- forcing sexist and racist stereo- types — particularly if they’re women of color, experts say. “Historically, our society has not done a good job of giving women s pace f or their a nger,” s aid Pooja Lakshmin, a clinical assis- tant professor of psychiatry at George Washington University School o f Medicine and the founder of Gemma, a digital education platform focused on women’s mental health. “From what we’ve learned growing up, anger is a dangerous emotion... y ou’re a ‘bad woman’ if you’re angry, especially if you’re a woman of color or a Black woman,” she added. The stereotype of the “angry

Black woman” is still pervasive. It stretches back to slavery and can lead to misdiagnoses, less effec- tive mental health treatment and cyberaggression toward Black women, according to Soraya Che- maly, the author of “Rage Be- comes Her: The Power of Wom- en’s Anger.” Latinas who express anger tend to be sexually objecti- fied in response, Chemaly added, noting that Asian women who show anger are often stereotyped as “sad.” And angry W hite women, Chemaly said, are often stereotyped as “crazy” in light of the structural privileges they hold as a group compared with women of color. Attendees to the primal scream events — who appear to be over- whelmingly White women in pho- tos — were met with similar critiques from some commenters on social media, who noted that the women h ad the p rivilege to attend the events without their kids and likely had the option to work from home during the pandemic. But for Burke, critiques imply- ing that the screaming women had nothing to be angry about have the effect of invalidating the unique struggles she and other stay-at-home mothers face, she

said. “Stay-at-home moms did not sign up to be trapped in their house all day long,” she said. “Ev- eryone’s hard is different, but ev- eryone’s hard is hard.” Some women w ho attended the events said collectively screaming helped them reframe their views about the validity of their anger, as well as the power of expressing it alongside others in similar circumstances. “I have always seen anger as a negative, and I’ve learned that it’s not a negative, it’s healthy, and it’s how you respond and how you react” to it, said Jessica Kline, 38, publisher of the family-focused website Macaroni Kid Clifton- Montclair. Kline organized a Feb. 6 #MomScream event in Ve- rona, N.J., that drew a dozen moms. “I think this is something that I definitely could’ve used maybe even monthly for the past two years,” Kline said of the event. (She has a second scream event planned for March 13.) In Anchorage, 43-year-old Cali- sa Kastning, co-founder of Moms Matter Now, an online community focusing on maternal mental health, screamed alone in her yard for a few days before she and more than a dozen other local moms gathered in a parking lot to scream together Jan. 22, sur- rounded by the flashing lights of their minivans, she said. There was no comparing the two screams, she said: “It just feels so much better to do it with other moms.” The communal aspect of the events make them “a very healthy and appropriate way to get your anger out,” according to Laksh- min. But unless moms act on their anger in a responsible way — by articulating the support they need from others, or mobilizing to change stressful circumstances within their control — they won’t be putting that anger to its full potential, Lakshmin added: “There’s a l ot of energy that comes with rage and with anger — so how do we channel the rage that’s coming to the forefront, rightly so, and actually m ove to take action?” Efforts are already underway among some moms who are using their anger to advocate for the Senate to pass the stalled Build Back Better legislation, which

some Democrats hope will include funding for child care and expanded child tax credits, among other measures that would help parents. Last month, the grass-roots group MomsRising launched a rage line for parents to call in to leave messages venting their frustrations about the lack of child care and paid family and medical leave while they wait for the legislation to move along. (The group is assessing whether to keep the line open, according to chief executive and co-founder Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner.) Others — including some who led the primal scream events — are trying to confront inequities at home, where women do the majority of unpaid domestic labor, research shows. Harmon and her husband are working to more equally share the burden of household chores, which she has traditionally done most of, she said. Kastning said she and her husband are trying to do the same. Chemaly sees such negotia- tions as key ways for women to more effectively express their anger beyond #MomScream events. “A first step for a lot of these people out there screaming in the fields is [to ask], do you actually express y our need and expect your family members to understand that, or respond to it, or to say, ‘Okay, what can we do?’ ” she said. Struggling moms who don’t have access to a primal scream event should reach out to friends and other mothers via social media to express their anger in envi- ronments in which they’ll be supported, as well as take care to not be critical of themselves, Laksh- min said. And “if you’re noticing that that rage is getting in the way of your ability to function, then it’s a sign that you should reach out to a mental health professional,” Lak- shmin added, d irecting parents to the resources offered by Postpar- tum Support International as one place to start. Burke is back to managing her stress through her preferred methods, including therapy and daily exercise. But she has no regrets about unleashing her primal scream. As she put it: “We as women have carried so much of the load, and we are allowed to be mad.”

Can screaming in a field ease mothers’ anger? These women are trying it out.

ALICE ROUSE Sarah Harmon, right, and other moms participate in a primal scream event in January in Peabody, Mass. Harmon, a therapist, has released a guide on how moms can plan their own scream events.

and is reason to feel optimistic about the future of our craft.” Winners will be honored at an in-person luncheon April 8. Last week, the Polk program also announced a new award in honor of Sydney H. Schanberg, whose work as a reporter, editor and columnist spanned decades. As a New York Times foreign correspondent in 1975, he chronicled Cambodia’s fall to the brutal Khmer Rouge, reporting that in- spired the film “The Killing Fields.” Schanberg died in 2016 at 82. His widow, journalist Jane Frei- man Schanberg, stipulated that the $25,0 00 prize should honor long-form investigative journalism with lasting impact that covers i ssues such as government corruption or abuse, military in- justice, war crimes or sedition. Luke Mogelson of the New Yorker is the first Schanberg prize recipient. His 12,000-word dispatch “A mong the Insurrec- tionists” provided an on-the- ground account of the siege of the Capitol. In r emarks filmed f or his acceptance of the prize, Mo- gelson called Schanberg “an ex- emplar of the kind of journalism I aspire to.” “If this article about the anti- democratic forces in the U.S. and their increasing militarization can have a fraction of the impact Sydney Schanberg’s stories did, I’ll be even more gratified,” Mo- gelson said. Other Polk winners include: l Foreign reporting: Maria Abi-Habib, Frances Robles and New York Times staff for their investigation into the murder of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse. l Local reporting: Corey G. Johnson, Rebecca Woolington and Eli Murray of the Ta mpa Bay

Times for an investigation into a lead-smelting factory endanger- ing workers. l State reporting: Carol Mar- bin Miller and Daniel Chang of the Miami Herald, along with ProPublica, for exposing how an old law meant to shelter medical providers from lawsuits impact- ed parents of disabled children. l International reporting: Ian Urbina of the New Yorker for “The Secretive Prisons That Keep Migrants Out of Europe.” l Medical reporting: Adam Feuerstein, Matthew Herper and Damian Garde of STAT News for an exposé of how a drug manu- facturer used FDA back channels to get approval for a polarizing Alzheimer’s medication. l Business reporting: Jeff Hor- witz and the Wall Street Journal staff for “The Facebook Files” series. l Environmental reporting: David Muir, Almin Karamehme- dovic and Esther Castillejo of ABC News for “The Children of Climate Change.” l Magazine reporting: Sarah Stillman of the New Yorker for “The Migrant Workers Who Fol- low Climate Disasters.” l Military reporting: Freelanc- er Azmat Khan and Dave Philipps and Eric Schmitt of the New York Times for investiga- tions into intelligence failures surrounding airstrikes in the Middle East, including a drone attack that mistakenly killed an aid worker and seven children during the U.S. military’s withdrawal from Afghanistan. l Political reporting: Linda So, Jason Szep and others at Reuters who chronicled widespread efforts by Donald Trump support- ers to intimidate poll workers and government officials.

JOHN MCDONNELL/THE WASHINGTON POST T he Post won Polk Awards for national and technology reporting. The N ew York Times and the New Yorker also won two p rizes each.

do, according to the Gallup data. Meanwhile, 86.3 percent of respondents self-identified as straight or heterosexual. The poll was conducted by tele- phone last year, and incorporated a random sample of more than 12,000 adults across the country, Gallup said. The high rate of LGBTQ self- identification r eflects a combina- tion of increasing cultural acceptance for L GBTQ people and the fact that Gen Zers are increasing in the national population of adults while members of older generations are dying, according to Gallup senior editor Jeffrey Jones. “They’ve really grown up in a culture where being LGBT was normal and not something that people had to be embarrassed about or try and hide,” Jones said of members of Gen Z. “Certainly there’s still some discrimination, but it’s n othing like it’s b een when the older generations were growing up... it’s b oth things happen- ing — the behaviors and the atti- tudes are changing, and it’s also the population changing.” On social media, advocates cheered the growing number of Americans identifying as LGBTQ. “Thanks to increases in visibility, representation, and equality, more and more LGBTQ Ameri- cans are able to come out and live as our authentic selves,” Sarah Kate Ellis, president and chief executive of GLAAD, wrote on Twitter. Human Rights Campaign in- terim president Joni Madison said in a statement: “With more LGBTQ+ people than ever before living openly and embracing their identity, the fight for LGBTQ+ equality in America must continue to represent this ever-growing and beautiful community.” LGBTQ members of Gen Z are most likely to identify as bisexual, at 15 percent, compared with 6 percent of millennials, the poll found. More than half of LGBTQ Americans overall — 57 p ercent — identify as bisexual, according to the results. (Respondents could select multiple responses.) Gen Zers are also more likely to identify as lesbian, gay, transgen- der or “other” than members of other generations, according to the results. Gallup began measur- ing each category within “LGBT” individually in 2020, and this

POLL FROM C1 year marked the first year that they offered respondents the option to type in a response in the “other” category, Jones said, adding that Gallup plans to release more data next year based on those self-identifications. Some of the disparities between generations, Jones said, may partially be due to older people being less inclined to self- identify due to growing up in a time of less acceptance for L GBTQ people. (The Gallup data shows that LGBTQ identification tends to remain stable among older generations, hovering around 4 percent for Generation X, 3 percent for baby boomers and 1 percent for traditionalists since Gallup’s first survey on L GBTQ self-identification in 2012.) Gen Zers also increasingly make up a larger share of Ameri- can adults as more of them turn 18 (the Pew Research Center de- fines Gen Zers as being born between 1997 to 2012). And younger Gen Zers are more likely than older members of their generation to identify as LGBTQ, given that the percentage of them who have identified as LGBTQ has nearly doubled since 2017, when it was 10.5 percent. The distinctions between Gen Zers and millennials reflect the progress LGBTQ people have made over the past few decades, according to Sharita Gruberg, vice president of the LGBTQI+ Research and Communications Project at the Center for Ameri- can Progress, an independent

nonpartisan policy institute. When older millennials were in high school, in 2003, the Su- preme Court ruled in the land- mark Lawrence v. Texas case that the criminalization of sodomy was unconstitutional, Gruberg pointed out, adding that the Su- preme Court ruled in favor of marriage equality more than a decade later — in 2015 — when older Gen Zers were in high school. Of the legal progress LGBTQ people saw during the time peri- od, Gruberg added: “I can’t stress enough what a difference that makes in your comfort with your identity, in public opinion... a nd around stigma.” But LGBTQ people — and Gen Zers in particular — still face myriad challenges: Gruberg’s team published research last fall showing that more than half of LGBTQ Gen Zers report experi- encing discrimination, and face higher rates of mental health is- sues and housing instability than older generations of LGBTQ people. And 10 states so far this year have enacted bans barring trans- gender students from participat- ing in sports consistent with their gender identity, according to the Movement Advancement Project, an independent nonprofit think tank. Data on LGBTQ people can be hard to come by: Last year marked the first time the U.S. Census Bureau started asking Americans about their gender identity and sexual orientation on their Household Pulse Survey, used to measure the pandemic’s impacts on households. “We have very little information through quality government data, so in the absence of that, the Gallup poll has really served as how we estimate how many L GBTQ people are in the country,” Gruberg said. The Gallup poll is just a start, she noted, pointing to the fact that it doesn’t include data on race or disability, and that 6.6 percent of people surveyed did not respond. But given that Gallup research- ers expect the proportion of L GBTQ Americans to continue to increase in the near future, the survey and its findings mark a key step forward, she said: “We’re moving to a place where more than one in 10 Americans is L GBTQ — that is information that policymakers need to have.”

More Gen Z adults identify as LBGTQ

“Thanks to increases in

visibility,

representation, and

equality, more and

more LGBTQ

Americans are able to

come out and live as

our authentic selves.” Sarah Kate Ellis, president a nd chief executive of GLAAD

The Washington Post - USA (2022-02-22)

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