This episode of Michigan Minds features Meredith Hope, PhD, who is currently a scholarship-to-practice fellow at the National Center for Institutional Diversity (NCID) at the University of Michigan. A significant part of her role at NCID is to amplify the voices of diversity scholars and contribute to traditional and new media initiatives.
Hope is a developmental psychologist with expertise in educational psychology and public health. Her research promotes positive and long-term health outcomes for Black youth and emerging adults.She examines how the presence of cultural institutions and resources promote well-being in the midst of ongoing adversity, such as racial discrimination and community violence.
“Religious communities are foundational to Black resilience, not only providing spiritual sustenance for congregants, but [through] civic, sociopolitical, educational, and culturally relevant resources to the surrounding community beyond their walls,” she says. “Religious communities in general remain understudied for Black youth populations and I’m really excited about the opportunity to do the work that I’m doing.”
Her research in this area sprouted from her interest in looking at environments that youth spend their time in. She notes that although people have explored what makes schools, neighborhoods in home environments positive or negative places for Black youth to develop, it’s curious that researchers haven’t looked at how that dynamic plays out in religious communities.
“One of the things that’s so interesting is that Black youth and emerging adults—in fact, Black Americans across the life course—, are the most religious and spiritual out of all racial and ethnic groups in the United States,” says Hope. “With this being such a high statistic of people saying that their religion is important to them, it makes a lot of sense to me to take some of that rigorous approach that we’re using for schools, neighborhoods, and other communities that youth are spending their time in, places where they’re getting socialized, places where they’re forming relationships—and apply those approaches to studying religious communities.”
Hope speaks on “Juneteenth” (June 19), which was recently designated a federal holiday. She explains that to understand what Juneteenth is, we have to know the history behind it. “Black Texans living in slavery did not hear that they were legally free until June 19, 1865, when federal troops rode into Galveston to declare it so. It’s also important to note that this did not mean that all African Americans experienced freedom. This is just the day that they heard it,” she explains.
Hope says that the federal acknowledgment of Juneteenth creates more national awareness of the complex historical roots that continue to touch and affect every aspect of our lives today.
“For example, we teach the history of the 4th of July as a significant part of our nation. Though history is taught in myriad ways, we did not until recently have a holiday on the books that directly acknowledged our nation’s history with African enslavement.”
Black people have historically been at the forefront of the civil rights struggle, Hope says, and have worked hard to achieve equal rights. “I’m proud personally to be a descendant of African slaves and to be a part of this ongoing history. I’m experiencing some of what they fought for. As Juneteenth is being recognized as a federal holiday, it signals that there’s much more work to be done so that African Americans and other Black people in the United States experience fewer structural disparities and generational inequity to truly live as equal contributors and participants in this nation.”
