Scenes diplomats had worked hard to avoid erupted this week: Israeli police clubbing Ramadan prayergoers, Israeli civilians being killed in the West Bank, viral clips of bound-and-tied Palestinians lying facedown in the venerated Al-Aqsa Mosque, barrages of rockets from Gaza and Lebanon being answered by Israeli airstrikes, access being restricted to Jerusalem holy sites.

The ongoing violence and police crackdowns have ripped up a fragile, hard-negotiated peace – brokered by the United States, Jordan, Egypt, Israel, and the Palestinian Authority – that initially allowed tens of thousands to pray and observe their holidays freely as Ramadan, Holy Week, and Passover were set to coincide.

Yet the strife was less a failure of the U.S.-led diplomacy, observers say, than it was the success of extremists and far-right instigators to fan the flames of distrust in a decades-old unsolved conflict.

“Well,” sighs an Arab diplomat close to the talks with Israel over Al-Aqsa access, “the extremists got what they wanted.”

Among the casualties of the rapid deterioration of calm in Israel and the Palestinian territories are the brief harmony enjoyed by followers of the three Abrahamic faiths in Jerusalem and the rare window of joy Ramadan gives to beleaguered Palestinian Muslims, especially in the area around Al-Aqsa, which they regard as a refuge.

As of Friday, behind-the-scenes diplomacy to restore order and facilitate the removal of many of the 2,300 Israeli police in and around Al-Aqsa, among Islam’s holiest sites, had largely failed, with the Israeli government focusing instead on its military response to the cross-border rocket fire.

Dialogue with the Israeli government has “practically been closed shut,” Jordanian sources say.

Friday prayers were held by 90,000 Muslim Jerusalemites without incident at Al-Aqsa, located in a walled, elevated compound revered by Jews as the Temple Mount. A handful of prayergoers cheered Hamas rockets and the West Bank killings.

The restrictions and recriminations ended several days of successful cooperation between Israeli, Palestinian, and Jordanian officials that facilitated the entry of tens of thousands of Christian and Muslim Palestinians daily from the West Bank (even some from Gaza) to Jerusalem to observe holidays and prayers – some of whom entered the Holy City for the first time in their lives.

Ammar Awad/Reuters

Palestinian Muslims attend Friday prayers in the Old City compound known to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary and to Jews as the Temple Mount, in Jerusalem, April 7, 2023.

Amid a light police presence, last Friday saw 280,000 worshipers fill the mosque compound – the largest number of prayergoers at one time at the site since 1986, according to the Jerusalem Waqf, the organization overseeing the compound, which called it a “historic day.”

Tens of thousands of Palestinian Christians marked Palm Sunday without incident.

Extremist rhetoric

Yet the rhetoric by both far-right Jewish Israelis and the Islamist militant movement Hamas ratcheted up tensions in the days leading up to Passover, which began Wednesday night.

Disagreements began over itikaf, the Islamic practice of sequestering oneself in a mosque overnight and for multiple days for prayer and reflection, mainly observed in the final 10 days of Ramadan to coincide with when Muslims believe the Quran was revealed.

Under an agreement reached between Israel, Palestinians, Jordan, and the Jordan-appointed Jerusalem Waqf, religious authorities closed the mosque compound after final night prayers from 11:00 p.m. until 4:30 a.m. for the first 20 days of Ramadan, only allowing itikaf on the 20th  day, or April 11, onwards.

Yet Hamas immediately jumped on the issue as an attempt by Israelis to regulate Al-Aqsa, calling on Muslims to defy the measure and practice itikaf and camp out in Al-Aqsa every night of the holy month.  

Officials believe it was an attempt by Hamas to incite a clash between worshippers and heavy-handed Israeli police to prove the path of negotiation and diplomacy pursued by its rival Palestinian Authority and Jordan was doomed to failure.

For the first 10 nights of Ramadan, the Waqf managed to convince the handful of stragglers to leave the mosque.

Yet as Passover neared, calls from Hamas to camp out in the compound became louder even as far-right Israelis called on Jews to sacrifice animals at the Temple Mount to “retake” it.

In the lead-up to Passover, Israeli police arrested the head of the Returning to the Mount group calling for the sacrifices as well as several Israelis attempting to bring animals to the holy site, Israeli news reports said. Mainstream rabbis rejected the far-right’s calls to revive the rite.

Yet the arrests failed to assuage Palestinians’ concerns or blunt the sharp messaging by both far-right Messianic Jewish groups and Hamas, which treated Passover sacrifices at the Temple Mount as a certainty.

Fatima Shbair/AP

Palestinians inspect damage from overnight Israeli airstrikes in Gaza City, April 7, 2023. Israel struck targets in the Gaza Strip after a day of rocket fire along the country's northern and southern borders. The fighting follows two days of unrest at Jerusalem's most sensitive holy site.

The presence in the Israeli government of far-right ministers who have called for sacrifices and demolishing Al-Aqsa in the past – including Itamar Ben-Gvir, who is responsible for security on Temple Mount – convinced many Palestinians that an “attack” on the mosque was imminent.

“During Passover, they are going to try to sacrifice goats at Al-Aqsa as a precursor to demolishing the mosque and building the Third Temple. This is what Ben-Gvir has called for,” Mohammed Hussein, a 20-year-old resident of Jerusalem’s Old City, told the Monitor Tuesday.

“We will do everything to stop them.”

Which is why dozens of Palestinian youths holed themselves up inside Al-Aqsa Tuesday night after the last of evening prayers, armed with fireworks and rocks in what they believed was their duty to “defend” the holy site.

When the Waqf failed to persuade the youths to leave, Israeli police broke down the doors and stormed the mosque, firing stun grenades.

The raid damaged several ancient doors, broke stained-glass windows, damaged offices, burnt the mosque carpet, ended in more than 350 arrests, and led Hamas and Israel to exchange fire.  

On Wednesday, Israeli police and soldiers did not wait for evening prayers to conclude, storming the mosque and attacking actual prayergoers, deepening the crisis. Rockets were fired again from Gaza and from Lebanon, followed by more Israeli airstrikes. No injuries were reported.

On Thursday and Friday, skirmishes with prayergoers continued during the day. Israel restricted the access of Palestinians under the age of 40 and deployed hundreds of police and soldiers within the mosque compound, which the Waqf said transformed the holy site into a “military barracks.”

A shooting attack in the West Bank killed a pair of Israeli sisters in the Jordan Valley and wounded their mother.

Fleeting joy

The violence and crackdowns closed a rare window of joy for Muslim Palestinians who, up until Tuesday evening, were marking a holy month of prayer, communal meals, and night celebrations.

Daily, hundreds of families from Jerusalem and the West Bank came to the mosque for daylong outings, bringing blankets, meals, and toys, and holding picnics at the compound, giving it the atmosphere of a block party.

On Monday, between prayers, dozens of children and more than a few adults kicked soccer balls in the plazas and treed areas around Al-Aqsa and the ornate Dome of the Rock.

Taylor Luck

Palestinians gather for a sunset break-fasting iftar meal at the Al-Aqsa Mosque complex with the Dome of the Rock behind them in Jerusalem, April 1, 2023.

As sunset neared, pickup soccer games grew in size, toddlers floated toy planes in the air, Jerusalem youths palmed volleyballs back and forth, and adults and children skipped rope.  

“Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Noble Sanctuary is our only breathing space as Jerusalemites in the Old City,” Mohammed Farawi explains from his home adjacent to the compound’s wall in the Old City. “Ramadan is the only time of the year that we can take full breaths. If there are no restrictions.”

At sunset, strangers gathered next to each other for shared iftar meals, brought in by themselves or charity kitchens.

After sunset prayers, Jerusalemites distributed sweets and coffee to the thousands of out-of-towners. At the end of tarawih evening prayers, Old City residents stationed at the Bab Hutta gate gave out cups of coffee and sahlab sweetened milk to exiting prayergoers as they walked on to Damascus Gate, where food vendors, clowns, music, and horse and camel rides awaited.

Rare respite

“Most days and months out of the year we are divided by checkpoints, the separation wall, and by settlements,” says Umm Khalil, who came with her four children and husband from Ramallah, speaking at the mosque compound Monday. 

“Ramadan is a time we feel united as Palestinians and as Muslims. For a few days, we are a reunited family.”

The Al-Aqsa compound, particularly during Ramadan, is one of the few places offering Palestinians a respite.

“We are targeted and harassed by the Israeli police and settlers when we pick olives, we are stopped at checkpoints when we try to go to work, we are raided by the military when we are sitting in our homes,” says Bashar, who came from Nablus in the West Bank.

“But when we are within the walls of Al-Aqsa we are safe, we are protected, we can be ourselves.” he said. “While we are here, not only do we feel close to our religion, but we feel we are living a normal life.”

Which is why when Israeli police raided the mosque compound this week, Palestinians saw the incursions not only as a desecration of a holy site, but an intrusion on their lone safe space in an occupied land.

“We are ready to give up our lives to defend Al-Aqsa,” says Mr. Hussein, the Jerusalem youth, “because if Al-Aqsa is occupied by police or settlers, our ability to breathe is gone.”

Mark Bauerlein has become disillusioned with the political and academic ideal sometimes called “the free marketplace of ideas,” especially in America’s institutions of higher education.

It’s always been a confident and even optimistic ideal, springing from the emergence of Enlightenment liberalism and its emphasis on freedom of speech and individual rights. As its capitalist metaphor suggests, the ideal maintains that only in a free and open encounter of opposing ideas can truth and freedom prevail.

It also presumes a particular danger in the suppression of ideas – even those a majority might consider loathsome or dangerous. Silencing opinions inevitably corrupts an open process of inquiry and discovery, the theory goes, thus privileging only the ideas of those with power.

“You know, the marketplace of ideas is a great concept, but it doesn’t exist anymore,” says Dr. Bauerlein, a conservative scholar who’s helped Florida educators revamp their English language arts standards over the past few years. “The problem is, there’s been a purge of conservatives from higher education for 30 or 40 years, and conservative opinion has grown abhorrent on campus, especially in this woke era.”

Librarians and historians, meanwhile, point to the record number of book bans last year – largely in red states, targeting works by Black and LGBTQ+ writers – as silencing voices speaking uncomfortable truths about America’s history. Last month, a Florida charter school principal lost her job when a middle school art class saw a picture of Michelangelo’s David. Two parents complained they were not notified in advance, as was school policy, while a third called the biblical masterpiece “pornography.” After another parent complained, a district in Florida will no longer show the Disney movie, “Ruby Bridges,” about the 6-year-old who helped integrate Louisiana schools.

“I just think that we are moving backward,” says Claytee White, director of the Oral History Research Center for the University of Nevada, Las Vegas Libraries. “A lot of us wanted to believe that we had free and open discussions in this country, and that we can talk about anything, and that we can make changes. It sounds great as cocktail-party chitchat, when we are all in the room with the same beliefs.”

The fighting faiths within this moment’s so-called culture wars have more and more begun to consciously abandon their ideals, but it doesn’t have to be that way, says Frank Buckley, professor at the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University in Arlington, Virginia.

“It’s very heavy-handed of a legislature to instruct colleges in what shall and what should not be taught,” he says. However, he adds, “there is a problem of ideological uniformity on campuses. ... And further, if we are loyal to America in some way, that means that we remember all the good things about American history, and that we have a certain amnesia about the bad things.”

AP/File

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (seated, second from right), shown in New York City in 1917, is credited with coining the ideal of the marketplace of ideas, once seen as a bedrock American principle.

A Holmesian ideal

Throughout America’s stormy history, however, the free marketplace of ideas – or free speech embedded within a capitalist metaphor – has always been bitterly contested. It was coined more or less by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. in an impassioned dissent in a 1918 Supreme Court decision. He used the free marketplace metaphor to decry the conviction of Jewish anarchists distributing anti-war and anti-government leaflets.

“Persecution for the expression of opinions seems to me perfectly logical,” Holmes wrote. “If you have no doubt of your premises or your power, and want a certain result with all your heart, you naturally express your wishes in law, and sweep away all opposition. ...

“But when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas,” he continued, “that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out.”

In the end, Mr. Holmes’ dissent over a century ago evolved, both legally and culturally, to become something close to a bedrock American value, especially within the areas of politics and education.

New College

Earlier this year, Dr. Bauerlein was at the center of an academic controversy after Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, appointed him and five other conservatives to the board of trustees of New College of Florida, a liberal arts college with 700 students and 90 faculty members in Sarasota.

Despite the institution’s small size, academic associations and liberal thinkers around the country condemned these appointments as part of a conservative power grab. One association dismissed the conservative appointees as “would-be indoctrinators of views that undermine the purpose of higher education in a democracy.”

For Dr. Bauerlein and other conservatives, there’s a maddening irony in such complaints, since they believe American educational institutions have already been undermined by decades of liberal indoctrination, especially when it comes to the issues of race and human sexuality.

In only the most recent of many similar episodes, they say, students at Stanford Law School last month relentlessly heckled the federal judge Stuart Kyle Duncan, who had been invited to speak by the school’s Federalist Society chapter. Students shouted insults and waved banners accusing the conservative jurist of crimes against women, Black people, and LGBTQ+ people.

When Judge Duncan asked the associate dean for diversity, equity, and inclusion for help to restore order, she walked to the lectern and turned to him instead. “For many people here, your work has caused harm,” she said. Stanford administrators later apologized to Judge Duncan, and announced a mandatory half-day session on the principles of freedom of speech. 

Al Drago/AP

Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders delivers the Republican response to President Joe Biden's State of the Union address, Feb. 7, 2023, in Little Rock. She signed an executive order that defined critical race theory as “antithetical to the traditional American values of neutrality, equality, and fairness.”

Political intervention in academia

The perceived purge of conservatives from institutions of higher learning has led many conservatives and Republican lawmakers to fundamentally rethink the idea of the free marketplace of ideas. Many have even embraced a robust new role for government intervention as they pass regulations banning the teaching of critical race theory and ideas about sex and gender. 

“At what point is it in any way justified for political authorities to step in and start making intellectual, academic decisions about what goes on in classrooms, about what books are assigned?” says Dr. Bauerlein, professor emeritus at Emory College of Arts and Sciences in Atlanta, where he taught English for almost three decades. 

“What do you do when the scholarly associations, when the institutions themselves, when professors and administrators are not upholding academic freedom?” he continues. “That is the point when you do need outside political intervention.”

Since January 2021, just months after the murder of George Floyd by police sparked nationwide protests, at least 18 states have imposed various government interventions on the teaching of critical race theory, an academic tradition usually taught in graduate school that analyzes the lasting impacts of American laws and institutions that maintain the legacies of racial inequality.

In many states, banned ideas include teaching students they “should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race or sex.”

In Arkansas, Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed an executive order that defined critical race theory as “antithetical to the traditional American values of neutrality, equality, and fairness. It emphasizes skin color as a person’s primary characteristic, thereby resurrecting segregationist values, which America has fought so hard to reject.” 

In Texas, legal restrictions against critical race theory include a ban of any concept teaching that “an individual, by virtue of the individual’s race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously.”

Florida’s new Parental Rights in Education law, which critics have dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” law, prohibits classroom instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity in kindergarten through the third grade, and Governor DeSantis’ administration is now seeking to expand this ban for all elementary and high school classrooms.

Florida’s new restrictions also mandate that school libraries must be age-appropriate and free from pornography. All books must now be approved by re-trained media specialists, who are charged to remove any books that violate the state’s new bans on race- and sex-related topics. That has included the removal of books and movies about Civil Rights icons from Rosa Parks to Ruby Bridges.

As these states continue to pass general bans of concepts of race and sexuality, efforts to ban books in local jurisdictions nearly doubled in 2022, according to the American Library Association. It tracked almost 1,300 attempts to ban related books, the highest number the association found in more than 20 years of studying censorship efforts.

Jefferee Woo/Tampa Bay Times/AP

The Banned Book Library at American Stage in St. Petersburg, Florida, Feb. 18, 2023. In Florida, schools have covered or removed books under a new law that requires an evaluation of reading materials. Efforts to ban books nearly doubled in 2022, according to the American Library Association.

Demonizing history?

As a local historian, Ms. White talks to longtime residents of Las Vegas and surrounding areas, compiling their memories of their experiences, with projects that include early health care in the city as well as a study of local musicians. 

But she doesn’t recognize what conservatives characterize as critical race theory. 

“I think very radical conservative Republicans understood immediately that this was going to teach the history in a way that it actually happened, and people were going to understand what systemic racism and structural racism does,” she says. “What really happened in American history, in all of its glory and all of its shame, and all of its ugliness and all of its beauty? All of it was going to be told now, and there was not going to be a way to keep it out of classrooms and to keep it out of textbooks.”

“But they don’t want that history told, and so they have done all kinds of things to demonize this history as indoctrination,” Ms. White says. And there’s an irony to the fact that as state governments begin to ban ideas, they focus especially on those of Black people and other marginalized groups.

For his part, Professor Buckley laments the increasingly nasty tit-for-tat creating a vicious cycle that risks silencing people of good will.

“The real problem is that mean-spiritedness at one end of the spectrum seems to provoke an equal and opposite reaction on the other,” Professor Buckley says. “And most people, I think, want to avoid all that. I think we’d like to go back to a time where we were permitted to feel generously about other Americans, but the people at the extremes are making that harder and harder.”

At the head of a pack of half a dozen roaring dirt bikers darting down Baltimore’s busy Reisterstown Road, a man known as “Neighborhood Hero” sees an opening in traffic and pulls into a clear lane. He pops a wheelie at 20 mph and waves at onlookers before pulling his front wheel even higher into the air – leaning so far back that he trails a gloved hand behind him on the ground, wet with light rain. Dropping the front wheel to the pavement, he triumphantly rockets forward into traffic.

Neighborhood Hero, astride his unlicensed, four-stroke Yamaha, rides a blurry, complicated line between cultural expression and criminal behavior. He’s part of the “bike life” culture, comprised mostly of young people of color riding off-road dirt bikes and all-terrain vehicles (ATVs) illegally on major roads and back alleys – sometimes even in parks – from New York City to Los Angeles to Paris.

Bike lifers and some familiar with their sport say that riding helps build community and gives young people an outlet that keeps them out of the fray of drug trafficking and gang violence. Detractors say riding off-road vehicles on city streets is loud, violent, and dangerous enough that – occasionally – people die.

 “This is a problem that a lot of major cities face,” says Lt. Christopher Warren, who led a Baltimore Police Department dirt bike task force between 2016 and 2020. But, he adds, it’s not a crime cities want to imprison people for.

Sophie Hills/The Christian Science Monitor

Dirt bikers gather for a ride through traffic on Baltimore's Reisterstown Road in January.

Comparisons to extreme sports of rebellion

Dirt biking is no different from skateboarding, extreme skiing, parkour, or even the subculture of gaming, says Malcolm Drewery, a sociology professor at the department of applied social and political sciences at Coppin State University – just blocks from that Reisterstown Road stretch called “The Wheel Deal” by bikers. “All of those have been given safe, legal spaces,” he adds.

While there are dirt bike and motocross tracks in suburbs of many cities, including Baltimore, access is limited to people who have the resources to trailer their dirt bikes to the track, says Dr. Drewery.

Some young people might still choose an open street over a separate course because they want an audience, says Johnny Rice, an assistant professor of criminal justice at Coppin State University. Someone might think, “because I’m not part of the crime and violence in Baltimore, I should be allowed to do this,” he says.

The urban dirt biking debate has simmered over at least three decades since the culture began forming in the late 1980s, boiling over when someone is injured or killed in an accident, or when riders set out to intimidate or assault drivers or taunt police. In November, a man was dragged from his car in New York’s Harlem and beaten by a group of riders. He died from his injuries. Dirt biking in Philadelphia led to several violent incidents in the fall, including one in which a dirt biker threw a brick at a marked police cruiser, breaking the windshield.

The official response varies. Baltimore, for example, has a long-running dirt bike tip line to report activity and even where vehicles are stored. In New York, former Mayor Bill de Blasio in 2021 made a cautionary flourish of publicly bulldozing some of the 565 dirt bikes and ATVs confiscated in just the second quarter of that year. Current New York Mayor Eric Adams did the same last summer.   

Bryan Dozier/Special to The Christian Science Monitor

Michael Whitaker, a "bike lifer," pulls the front of his all-terrain vehicle into a wheelie last October in East Baltimore, Maryland.

There’s physics in biking

But violence and aggression don’t reflect the bike life Levar Mullen has known since the age of 11 in Baltimore. Still riding now, in his 40s, he says violent incidents like the New York and Philadelphia deaths “shouldn’t reflect on the movement as a whole.”

“Bikes bring bonds,” he says, echoing the motto of the sport, and anyone behaving aggressively doesn’t embody bike life.

That community surrounding bike life, say some, could be a solution hiding in plain sight. 

A nonprofit, B-360, is attempting to mainstream the culture and get riders off city streets. It’s partnering with the Office of the State’s Attorney for Baltimore City to funnel youth with nonviolent dirt bike charges through B-360 programs, rather than the justice system.

Brittany Young, a Baltimore native, founded B-360 with the goal of “utilizing dirt bike culture to end the cycle of poverty, disrupt the prison pipeline, and build bridges in communities.” Her organization has worked with more than 9,000 students, teaching them mechanics and physics through riding and maintaining dirt bikes.  

Ms. Young doesn’t want riders in streets, she says, but she also doesn’t condemn those who want to ride. “We’ve helped people pivot,” she says, referring to B-360 programs that divert riders from city streets to areas where riding is more safe.

“In order to make it more safe, that means working with actual dirt bike riders. And so if you don’t work with riders to build a solution, or if you don’t work with the people close to the problem to be a part of solution, you lose them,” she adds. “We’ve also acknowledged yes, that can be dangerous, but that is why you have to have more infrastructure, why you have to have better regulation.”

“There is nothing wrong with popping a wheelie, we just want it to be out of traffic,” says Ms. Young, who wants to see a more nuanced policy approach to dirt bike laws, rather than what she sees as blanket criminalization, such as a misdemeanor charge simply for possessing a dirt bike. 

Engineering student Joi Scruggs is a mechanics instructor for B-360. She is learning to ride in legal spaces arranged by B-360.

Many of her friends who ride started as young as 5 years old, and she’s glad to see people finding joy in riding – an impact people who don’t ride might not expect, she says. While riding may seem dangerous to someone who doesn’t ride, the activity is an outlet for energy and relieving stress stemming from violence that can entrap young people, she says.

Dr. Rice, the criminal justice professor, suggests that part of the solution lies in encouraging off-road riding by generating both awareness of the culture as well as the dangers, perhaps in collaboration with an influencer like Chino Braxton, a Baltimore rider with 1.2 million Instagram followers.

Sophie Hills/The Christian Science Monitor

Urban dirt biker "Neighborhood Hero" pops a wheelie along a strip of Baltimore's Reisterstown Road known as the "Wheel Deal."

Respite from violence

In Philadelphia, City Council member Jamie Gauthier advocates a similar approach. Dirt biking is part of local culture and can – channeled appropriately – provide respite from violence for young people in unstable neighborhoods, she says. But, she adds, riding dirt bikes on city streets presents “real dangers.”

“While we’re looking to curtail dirt bike activity on our roads, I think we should ... be putting the same energy into finding local, safe, and free places for people to dirt bike,” she says. “I think we should acknowledge this as a part of our city’s culture and as a part of something that young people like to do as opposed to just having it become another thing to criminalize young people of color.”

Restrictions vary from city to city. In Baltimore, it’s illegal – classified as a misdemeanor – to own or operate unregistered ATVs and dirt bikes on public or private land. Philadelphia doesn’t allow the vehicles to be registered, prohibits their use on public property, and includes a $2,000 fine for the misdemeanor violation.  

Bryan Dozier/Special to The Christian Science Monitor

Risking misdemeanor citations and fines, "bike lifers" prep their all-terrain vehicles for a ride on Baltimore city streets last October.

In recent years, police have become more lenient, but from the late 1980s through the early 2000s, illegal riding was enforced more strictly, says Mr. Mullen. “Police would chase you like you’d committed a murder.” 

The Baltimore Police Department dirt bike task force launched in 2016 confiscated over 600 dirt bikes and eight handguns associated with those confiscations before it was disbanded in 2020, says Lieutenant Warren, who led the task force of three detectives.

Since 2020, Baltimore’s approach has shifted to steering young people away from illegal riding through programs like B-360.

This is an opportunity, says Dr. Drewery, the sociology professor at Coppin State. Instead of penalizing riding, the city should ask itself how to engage kids.

Neighborhood Hero, in his 20s, has been riding for almost 10 years and isn’t looking to give it up.

“This is like our basketball,” he says. “This is our stress reliever. If they want us off the street, they have to give us somewhere to ride, [and right now] there’s no place for us to ride but the streets.”

Ronald Gray/St. Martin's Press

Ernest Owens is the author of "The Case for Cancel Culture: How this Democratic Tool Works to Liberate Us All."

In 2019, Ernest Owens published a New York Times opinion piece, “Obama’s Very Boomer View of ‘Cancel Culture.’” The journalist was responding to remarks that the former president had made. Barack Obama had implored activists not to be overly judgmental of those who don’t measure up to “purity” tests. “That’s not bringing about change,” Mr. Obama said. In the opinion article, Mr. Owens countered that cancel culture has been vital to the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements. He expands on those ideas in “The Case for Cancel Culture: How this Democratic Tool Works to Liberate Us All.” Mr. Owens is an editor at large at Philadelphia Magazine and president of the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists, and he hosts the podcast “Ernestly Speaking!” He spoke recently with the Monitor.

How do you define cancel culture?

Anything in which a person chooses to cancel ... a person, place, or thing that they feel like is detrimental to their way of life and their well-being.

Let’s say you don’t want to go to McDonald’s because you think the burgers are nasty. That’s a critique. That’s a matter of taste. That’s not cancel culture. But let’s say you said, “I don’t want to go to McDonald’s ... because they don’t give their workers a fair, livable wage.” You’re making a decision that is impacting ... the well-being of others.

In your book, you argue that cancel culture has been with us for centuries. Can you briefly summarize that idea?

You could talk about the American Revolution when they dumped the Boston tea [in the harbor]. They didn’t dump the tea because they thought the tea was bad. They dumped it because they were trying to fight against Great Britain’s taxation without representation. You look at the civil rights movement, the Montgomery bus boycotts. Stonewall was a riot: LGBTQ people pushed back ... because the police were consistently harassing them based on their identity. The history [of cancel culture] has been in every community, every group, over the years and decades. 

If cancel culture has always been with us, what impact has social media had on it? 

It’s easier for us to see it. Back in the day, you didn’t necessarily see Stonewall. You heard about it. We’ve seen an influx in the increase of coordinated protests across the country, [like] Black Lives Matter, because of the use of social media. 

Do you think nonpublic figures should be canceled for their worst moment? 

I believe that there [are] opportunities for grace for people. But I also think that we spend so much time worried about the offender rather than the offended. 

Not all cancellations are equal. [Singer] Chrisette Michele, who ... did a performance [at Donald Trump’s] inauguration, lost her career. Is it fair? No, it’s not fair. So in this situation, you could argue that someone used cancel culture in a way that wasn’t as judicious or as graceful as some may have liked, and others may have found that it was [appropriate]. 

How does one ensure that cancel culture isn’t weaponized in ways that seem unfair?

I would argue that a world without cancel culture is a world where marginalized people don’t have access to having a voice. 

You think about how we got marriage equality. I just got married in 2021. For years, we just accepted that gay marriage was never going to be a thing in this country. It was taboo to talk about it. ... It wasn’t until certain people ... came out, spoke out publicly, and began to demand and push more, calling out certain folks in public office, demanding those changes, that then we saw a societal shift that then influenced public policy. That’s cancel culture. So when I think about the major benefits in society that cancel culture provides, I really, with all due respect, cannot ever give that much credence to these small anecdotal incidents [of nonpublic figures being canceled], because I know overall the larger impact of what it benefits and provides. 

What role is there for forgiveness for those that have been canceled? 

Society is more forgiving and gives more grace than ever. I don’t really know too many people who’ve been permanently canceled. Cancellation looks like a timeout. 

[Celebrity chef] Paula Deen was caught saying some inappropriate words. She lost some contracts with [the] Food Network and people were disappointed in her. She did some self-reflection. And a couple of years later, she’s on “Dancing with the Stars.” She’s got a career. 

[Former White House intern] Monica Lewinsky’s evolution to not being canceled, or being uncanceled, by society has a lot to do with how society progressed in believing women. The progression of understanding sexual harassment and power dynamics in these roles, how we advanced sexual harassment policies, how we advanced talking about rape culture. All of these things set up the system to then turn around and reimagine her in a different way. So, we as society have to keep evolving. 

Who is your audience for the book?

This book was important because it’s topical. It’s not for one type of community. It’s not for millennials. It’s not for conservatives only. It’s not for the boomers of the world that don’t get it. It’s for everyone, because there’s a lot of people, even in my generation as a millennial ... that don’t understand cancel culture. So I think it’s a great history lesson for anyone.

Photo by Melanie Stetson Freeman/The Christian Science Monitor

A poster shows what gang members are learning in a Chicago anti-gun violence program.

Year after year, the politics of gun violence in the United States has been stuck on what seems to be one binary choice: more gun control versus more mental health care. Meanwhile mass shootings persist at a pace of more than one per day.

One American city is trying to avoid that trap.

In Syracuse, a city of 425,000 people in upstate New York, the homicide rate is three times the national average. “We’re ready to try something new,” proclaimed an editorial on Tuesday on the news site syracuse.com. The city is poised to launch a new gun violence prevention strategy that sees every citizen – including those committing violence – as agents of change.

“I don’t want to wait until a young man is behind bars to figure it out,” said pastor Lateef Johnson-Kinsey, director of a new office set up by the mayor last year to reduce gun violence, in a recent radio interview. “Your community must become your youth ministry.”

The city conducted a granular study of gun violence. It found that between 2012 and 2021, homicides rose yearly by an average of 26.5%. It sought input from community violence experts in other cities and used crime data to identify the sources of violence down to specific gang members.

The study helped officials understand that gang members believe violence is a salve for their hopelessness, a result of poverty and broken homes. It also helped them recognize why disparate violence prevention initiatives haven’t worked. Solving gun violence, Mayor Ben Walsh said in his State of the City Address in January, requires a coherent approach. It means fixing blight in neglected neighborhoods and caring for the mental health of police officers.

Syracuse’s strategy centers on two ideas that have proven effective elsewhere, in cities like Boston and Chicago. One is that gang members themselves are vital resources in social healing. The other is to think of redemption as a job. Officials have identified 50 “top brass” shooters in four gangs. Their goal is to enroll these “gentlemen,” as Mr. Johnson-Kinsey calls them, in a program that includes counseling, job training, and better schooling.

But with compassion comes expectations. By focusing on the instigators of gang violence, the city hopes to create new role models for their peers. It wants participants to see themselves as government employees whose job is equal parts individual reform and community renewal. The program includes a modest monthly stipend – or “scholarship,” as Mr. Johnson-Kinsey calls it.

A similar program in Boston describes that approach as a process of being “uncornered” – a shift in mindset alike for individuals and communities caught up in gun violence. “Uncornered provides the scaffolding of resources that allow gang members to help themselves and those they love take advantage of new opportunities,” an article in Social Impact Review noted in February. It has “a more universal meaning. Most people would not think of a gang member as a solution, but rather as a problem. In this new way, we are all Uncornered in our thinking.”

Syracuse will need time to see if its plan’s many well-researched elements can work. For a nation caught in a debate about gun violence, the city is only the latest community charting a way out of the mental impasses of division and fear.