Facetime: Youth Movement

Author, activist, and teacher Lorene Cary ’74 believes that, by bringing more first-time voters to the polls, we can change our politics and the future.

Ian Aldrich

Lorene Cary ’74 has never shied away from taking chances. “I’m a writer because I like new stuff,” she says. Her writing has crossed into numerous genres, from opera and plays to fiction and memoir. Most notable is her critically acclaimed 1991 release, Black Ice, which recounts the Philadelphia native’s student years at St. Paul’s. But in addition to bringing truth and honesty to her own writing, Cary, who teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, has also worked to instill those values into her own students as they tell their stories and interact with their communities. In 2014, she launched Safe Kids Stories to help students and others explore themes around what it means to create a safe community. Four years later, she extended the work when she created VoteThatJawn, a voting drive initiative to bring new, young voters to the polls. (“Jawn” is Philly slang for a person, place, or thing.) The change was considerable. In 2018, nearly 7,000 new 18-year-old voters turned out for the midterm election; up from 2,700 four years before. For this year’s election, Cary and her group hope to help register 10,000 first-timers. Ian Aldrich recently caught up with Cary to talk about the power of story, the importance of the youth vote, and what it means to honor what you love to do.

So much of what you do is giving the people you work with the tools to tell a story. Especially their own. Why is that important?
What I’m really trying to help them get is honesty and integrity. I think America is full of shame. We’re just brimming with it. I think a lot of Americans who are well educated and well off are very afraid. [For years], I’ve talked to young people who are extraordinary writers, who love beauty, who want to do that work, want to tell stories but they cannot imagine how in God’s name they’re going to live if they’re not able to see $200,000 coming at them real quick. And if they can’t see that then they have to step away from this thing they love. They can’t imagine a world where they have to clean their own house or make their own food. It truly scares them.

What’s the origin story of VoteThatJawn?
You just cannot bring out the same notes every year and think it’s going to be alive in the classroom. You do have to keep changing and moving. I wanted my writing students to have to write about something that engaged them in their community. So, in 2014, I sent them all over the city to write about student safety from a solution perspective. Then, after the Parkland shootings in 2018, we ended up writing about the March for Our Lives. We had all these different perspectives, about civic engagement and political engagement. But it wasn’t even about guns. It was about that generation coming to an understanding that in order to get a world they wanted they would have to work for it and not just wait for it. After that, those young people told me I had to do something on voting. So, we created VoteThatJawn for the 2018 midterms.

I’m struck by how much you’ve gone to the young voters, rather than try to bring them to you.
That’s exactly right. I asked students what would engage them. Because we started it in my class, there’s no gap. Do you want to read that? Do your friends want to see that? Will you share it on your social? We’re having fun. We love to do information, games – we have this funny new Tik Tok we just did. We did an animated video that the city commissioners linked to on their page. We have our own rap song. We did an event at a local public television station. So few people have been in a TV station. To go to the place that broadcast Sesame Street when you were a kid, that’s fun.

You’ve said that early-in-life voting results in lifelong civic engagement. Why is that?
Early voting imprints itself on young people as a condition of adulthood. Ever notice how everybody listens with extra fun to the music they listened to in high school? It’s so hilarious. Oh, no, the real music is this. It’s because that’s the music that imprints on you when you first begin understanding music and you’re having all these other new experiences. Your first date. Your first kiss. You’re learning to drive. Similarly, when you become a citizen, you remember trying to figure out, for example, how in God’s name will you decide which judge to vote for when you didn’t look up what the Bar Association said. Or, you voted for someone and they won. And then did or didn’t do what they promised. It’s all of that. It’s like your first love.

What’s prohibited youth from voting in the past?
Over my 20-plus years of teaching, there were a lot of people my age who were kind of appalled there were a couple of generations after us who were not at all as civically involved. I believe it had a whole lot to do with the Reagan Revolution and young people becoming more conservative. Because if you are more conservative, then, as a young person, the status quo is okay. You don’t worry about politics, you don’t worry about changing the structures – you worry about getting into the structures and making your way through them. It doesn’t mean they were bad people, they understood that their role was to figure out how to succeed according to the rules, not to change rules. But that’s changing.

How would our politics and our governing change with more youth inclusion?
Our politicians would not be allowed to ignore climate change. Young people are scared to death about that. As they should be. I think science would do a little better than it’s doing right now if younger people voted more. They’re not as invested in legacy businesses that degrade the environment because they’re not old enough to be staked to oil or plastics. The other thing is, because of the browning of America, I think many people are less invested in our American foundational need to have our governments run by white men. I don’t think there’s a horrible resentment or desire to take down white men, but I think there’s a legitimate realization that anybody can fly a plane.

What’s the future of VotethatJawn?
I don’t know. I’m a writer and I really just want to be by my damn self, upstairs on the third floor of my house, at my desk, writing things. But I do this because it’s my duty. It’s my duty because of Black Lives Matter. And it’s always been my duty. I can’t go off by myself and write stuff and have fun.