Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Westwater Resources' Alabama Graphite plant is under construction on March 16 in Alexander City, Alabama.

Not long ago, while out scouting for turkey, hunter Jay Shipp came across a strange sight: neatly bulldozed gashes in the forest floor.

“I wasn’t quite sure what I was looking at,” he says. “But then it hit me: That’s the mine!”

The diggings were test pits to peek at a deposit of graphite folded in the Alabama bedrock.

For more than half a century, the United States has outsourced mining and processing of graphite, with China now the largest supplier. Yet here in deeply rural Kellyton, a massive new processing plant is being built to reopen a local mineral deposit known as the Higgins Ferry Group for mining.

The reawakening of a graphite mine in Alabama turns traditional narratives about mining and red-state views of climate change on their heads. It’s the Democratic Biden administration pushing for the mining, with graphite a crucial ingredient in electric car batteries. And Alabamians are welcoming the investment in what is being purported as a green energy project.

It is in part a story about a nation taking control of its clean energy future. As many as 15 planned battery factories – many in impoverished areas of the South – are being called a new American “battery belt” to establish greater industrial independence from China. Kellyton would be its buckle.

Yet the renewed mining also raises many of the same concerns as coal mining or other forms of extraction seen as damaging to the environment. The result is a complex array of questions that could shape key aspects of the climate change debate in new ways.

The Kellyton mine is at “the intersection of changes in the international system – the rise of China ... and the challenges that creates to supply chains – and the effort by the Biden administration to encourage transition to alternative energies,” says Thomas Oatley, a political scientist at Tulane University in New Orleans.

Rising demand

An average electric car battery contains 100 to 200 pounds of graphite. Graphite demand is expected to go up by 36% this year, according to a British commodity price reporting agency. The White House estimates that demand could increase by 4,000% in the next decade.

Graphite has been unprofitable to mine in Alabama because its density in the rock is only 3%, compared with 12% of other graphite mines, says Jeffrey Mauk, a researcher with the U.S. Geological Survey, in Denver.

But electric vehicle tax credits included in the Inflation Reduction Act have changed the calculus. The law requires EV batteries to come from local sources or free-trade partners.

John Locher/AP

Salt lines a brine evaporation pond at Albemarle Corp.'s Silver Peak lithium facility on Oct. 6, 2022, in Nevada. The Biden administration has awarded grants for projects that extract and process lithium, graphite, and other battery materials.

China’s threat in 2019 to cut off rare earth minerals to the U.S. defense industry also sharpened the Biden administration’s focus on crucial minerals.

“That got everybody’s attention in the political arena about what critical minerals mean for the security of the nation,” says Dr. Mauk. “That was an important trigger.”

In April, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan called domestically mined graphite and other minerals “the backbone of the clean energy future.”

Alabamians are on board. Republican Gov. Kay Ivey has touted Alabama’s leadership, and automakers continue to make investments in the state. Mercedes-Benz is already building EV batteries in Tuscaloosa, and Hyundai has announced a $300 million investment to build its all-electric Genesis GV70 SUV at its Montgomery plant.

The same is true elsewhere in the South. A new battery factory near Savannah, Georgia, is expected to offer thousands of high-paying jobs. Upstart EV truck-maker Rivian in 2021 announced plans for a large plant just outside of Atlanta. And BMW last year announced a $1.7 billion investment in EV-related activities in South Carolina.  

“There does seem to be this component of the Inflation Reduction Act that is pushing money into red states as a way of trying to encourage enthusiasm for the economic benefits of a green transition,” says Professor Oatley at Tulane. “In a way, that has undermined the standard Republican line on climate change.”

Boon for the rural South?

Near Kellyton, Alexander City has struggled for more than a decade after a massive textile mill moved abroad in 2013. Part of the area’s nascent rejuvenation has been tied to upscale development at Lake Martin, a reservoir featuring $1 million lakeside lots. But the graphite mine offers a different promise: Some miners in the state are currently bringing home $130,000 a year. The median income in Alabama is $27,000.

“The mine is a big deal,” says Scott Hardy, a city councilor in Alexander City. “It’s the only place in the U.S. that has this type of process. We have everything set up from the mining of graphite to putting the final piece of the car or truck together.”

Mr. Shipp, the hunter, is also the co-owner of a local roofing company. His firm’s fortunes, he says, tend to rise and fall with the state of the local economy. In that light, while 71% of voters in the county voted for Donald Trump in 2020, “you’d be hard-pressed to find any opposition to the mine,” despite its connection to President Joe Biden, he says.

But even as Democrats and Republicans find some ground for mutual agreement, the new mines do raise thorny environmental questions.

“There is an irony that we are embarking on another environmentally damaging process in order to offset or try to mitigate climate change,” says Professor Oatley. “The notion that it’s clean energy seems a bit inaccurate.”

Some point to potential inconsistencies in the green energy debate. While coal is widely seen as anathema to clean energy, the coal mined in Alabama is far less toxic and is used by the same domestic steel mills needed to build cars that qualify for the EV tax credits.

Historically supporters of unions, Democrats largely ignored a two-year-long coal miner strike in Tuscaloosa. What’s more, environmental risks to water and air quality, including greenhouse gases, are all part of stepped-up industrial production and mining.

“We need to recognize that producing clean energy has its own environmental and social impacts that we need to fix concurrently” with climate change response, mining expert Scott Odell told the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Climate Portal last year.

Yet a U.S. battery belt is “hard to argue against,” says M.V. “Trey” Hood, a political scientist at the University of Georgia.

“They’re not building a cigarette plant,” he says. “These are good-paying jobs. Some of them don’t require a college degree. At the same time, these are right-to-work states. They have good weather, cheap land, low regulation, low taxes. All those things help attract business.”

Ren Dezhi peers into his woodpile, looking for the Siberian weasel that a neighbor just spotted slinking toward his henhouse. 

Finding no trace of it, he gathers corn to feed his drove of donkeys – working stock for his small, 2-acre farm – and prepares to herd them into the rugged hills of northern Shaanxi province.

Mr. Ren’s tanned face bears the telltale wrinkles of a life spent farming on the harsh, windswept loess plateau. If he’d grown up in one of China’s big cities, he would be retired by now, enjoying a worker’s pension. Instead, he must eke out a living, raising crops of potatoes, beans, and corn on his scattered, terraced fields.

“Aiyah, this land can’t sustain us reliably,” Mr. Ren, in his late 60s, says with a sigh one recent morning. “If the weather is good, we can get a harvest. If there’s drought, we have nothing. We depend on heaven to eat.”

Across China’s countryside, tens of millions of older villagers like Mr. Ren are working hard well into their golden years – out of pride as well as, increasingly, because they must. As China rapidly ages, rural areas are graying faster: Nearly a quarter of rural people are over age 60. But traditional family support is waning and social security is meager. So in Shaanxi and elsewhere, resilient seniors are picking up odd jobs, toiling in fields, and trying new crops and greenhouse farming to make ends meet.

“Elderly will have to rely on themselves until they no longer can,” says Yong Cai, a professor of sociology and expert on China’s birth policies and population aging at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “It’s an arrangement of necessity.”

Empty wallets and empty nests

Mr. Ren and his wife, Lin Yiping, make less than $1,400 a year selling corn they grow as well as small amounts of wild medicinal herbs that they pick, dry, and peddle for about 7 cents a pound. They also receive a public pension of about $17 each a month – helpful for pocket money but little else. “This money won’t solve any problems for us,” Mr. Ren says of the pension. “We still have to take care of ourselves.”

Ann Scott Tyson/The Christian Science Monitor

Ren Dezhi (right) and his wife, Lin Yiping, sit in their village farmhouse in northern Shaanxi province. The couple farm corn and other crops on small, terraced fields that depend on rainfall.

Although China’s living standards have improved vastly in recent decades, with extreme poverty greatly alleviated, many villagers remain impoverished. “China’s journey in poverty reduction did not end with the eradication of absolute poverty in 2020,” states a World Bank report published last year. “With the adoption of a concept of poverty better suited to a moderately prosperous society, some 200 million people would still require support to realize improved living standards.”

As a group, rural workers are worse off than their urban peers. “People living in rural areas receive very little pension support and live well below the poverty line,” writes Yaohui Zhao, an economics professor at the National School of Development at Peking University, in a November 2022 Lancet commission report on healthy aging in China. In 2021, per capita income of rural residents was less than 40% that of city dwellers. 

Villages such as Mr. Ren’s are home mainly to empty nesters, their offspring having moved to cities in search of jobs, joining a wave of migrants now totaling 384 million. Wages are higher in cities due to China’s rural-urban divide, enforced by its long-rigid hukou population registration system. With many houses vacant and children’s voices rare, the hamlets are tranquil but, at times, forlorn for seniors.

“The fragmentation of the family is obviously a challenge” impacting care for China’s older villagers, says Stuart Gietel-Basten, professor of social science at Khalifa University in Abu Dhabi and former director of the Center for Aging Science at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. “Loneliness ... is a big issue, and the extent to which this is going to become a bigger issue in the future is ... a major concern.”

China’s deep-rooted Confucian values stress filial piety, obligating children, and sons in particular, to care for their aged parents. Offspring often do send funds home, but as they are fewer and more distant, experts say the ancient tradition of family support is breaking down, leaving rural seniors bereft.

Mr. Ren and his wife have two grown children living in a nearby town, but they too are strapped for resources. Their son digs oil wells – work that Ms. Lin says is unpredictable and dangerous. “Their lives are hard,” she explains, as she sweeps the farmhouse floor with a homemade straw broom. “They’ve barely solved the problem of having enough to eat and wear.”

So, like many older rural Chinese, the couple have resolved to fend for themselves to avoid burdening the younger generation. Cheerful and spry, Mr. Ren swings open the wooden gate of the donkey shelter. “Hey!” he calls to the beasts, rapping a wooden railing with a stick. He follows the herd down a dirt path, an umbrella tucked under his arm, and heads once again into the hills.

Pension problems

With a swift step on her shovel and tug of her hand, Gao Chunlian uproots a bunch of green onions, shakes off the dirt, and passes it to her husband to bag. Whether tending their vegetable garden or signing on with road crews, Ms. Gao shoulders the heavier work these days, with her husband being too feeble to farm.

Ann Scott Tyson/The Christian Science Monitor

Gao Chunlian, pictured in Shaanxi province, China on May 19, 2023, takes on day-labor jobs in surrounding areas to help support herself and her husband, who is no longer able to farm.

“As old as I am, I still have to work,” says the sexagenarian, sweeping back a loose strand of hair. “I even climb up the trees to pick apples!” 

The pay isn’t great, she says – only about $15 a day. Still, she rarely turns down a chance to earn money, even if it means going from village to village. 

“Wherever there is work, I will go there,” she says in her farmhouse in rural Shaanxi.

Down the road, three older farmers from Ms. Gao’s village toil with shovels, digging a ditch. A much younger boss sits in his car, supervising. “I get paid 120 yuan [$17] a day,” says Liu Wenfu, a farmer in his late 60s, sweating and catching his breath. 

Like Ms. Gao and Mr. Liu, more Chinese will have to work later in life to make ends meet in coming decades. 

“For most farmers, there is no such thing as ‘retirement,’” Niu Fengrui, former director of the Institute of Urban Development and Environment of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told China Business News in March.

China already has the biggest elderly population in the world. By 2050, an estimated 395 million Chinese will be 65 years old and above, making China the oldest of the 20 most populous countries. Meanwhile, the country’s birthrate is falling, a trend exacerbated by the “one-child” policy in place from 1980 to 2016, meaning there will be fewer working-age people to support these hundreds of millions of seniors. 

This population shift, coupled with rising local government debt and a slowing economy, is placing pressure on China’s pension system. China’s current average rural pension of about $25 a month “barely covers basic living expenses for seniors in rural areas,” Yixin Yao, a senior research fellow at the Asian Development Bank Institute, wrote in May in the state-run China Daily. This compares with an average monthly pension of $500 for urban workers. But Dr. Yao calls the current pension system, which by some estimates will run out of money this year, “unsustainable.”

Indeed, Beijing now plans to push all China’s older citizens to work longer. Earlier this year, state-run media reported the government plans to gradually raise the retirement age for urban workers to 65 – up from the current 60 for men, and 55 or 50 for women. “It will not be popular with anyone, but they realize at the macro level it’s necessary,” says Professor Yong.

The upshot is that raising rural pensions is “impossible” in China today, says Alfred Wu, associate professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore and an expert in central-local fiscal relations. The government doesn’t “have much money for rural areas,” he adds. “This is resource competition.”

Farmers show resilience

Practical and down-to-earth, senior farmers in the villages of northern Shaanxi are striving to make a living on their own for as long as they can, even if it means backbreaking work and sacrifice in what would be their golden years. 

Despite limited schooling, they are launching into new types of greenhouse farming, planting cash crops of apples and apricots, and other enterprises – trying to get ahead.

Farmer Li Shigui, who’s nearing his 70s, lives in a tiny brick hut perched on a steep terrace beside his greenhouse, which he rents from the government.

Ann Scott Tyson/The Christian Science Monitor

Farmer Li Shigui grows beans, melons, and other cash crops in a greenhouse much of the year. This helps him earn more than he did growing grain on traditional terraced fields in Shaanxi province, China.

Inside the mud-walled enclosure, rows of beans are climbing string trellises, and watermelons are ripening in nets suspended from the plastic dome ceiling. Mr. Li also grows tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, and other crops year-round.

“We have irrigation here,” he says, pointing to the pipe supplying pumped water to his crops. After decades spent relying on rainfall for harvests, Mr. Li has boosted his income to around $5,000 a year.

As with the other greenhouse farmers encamped in spartan, one-room dwellings scattered across the slope, Mr. Li’s venture has managed to gain him a bit more security, at least for now.

And as he heads back to his hut for the evening, he says with a tinge of pride, “I don’t get any money from the government.”

On a cool Sunday afternoon, a white disc whizzes through the air in Rowmari village, located in the Indian state of Assam. A teenage girl snatches it out of the air, earning applause and supportive whoops from the other players on the field, who all come from different villages.

The American flying disc game officially known as ultimate – or “ultimate Frisbee,” for those not worried about trademark infringement – was virtually unheard of in this part of the world till a few years ago. But it’s rapidly gaining popularity throughout northeast India. That includes Assam’s Chirang district, where over 30 girls and boys gathered in Rowmari village last December for a coaching session organized by the Action Northeast Trust (ant), a rural development nonprofit. They are some of the best players from the hundreds of ultimate teams in and around Chirang. After a warmup, the friendly match begins.

Chirang was not always this idyllic. Starting in the 1980s, the region experienced over two decades of ethno-religious conflict between the majority Bodos, Muslims, and the several other groups. Poverty is rampant, as are gender inequality and child marriage. But ultimate, with its emphasis on self-governance, provides an opportunity to foster peace among Assam’s newest generation.

Today, 3,500 children and youth from nearly 100 villages participate in the ant’s ultimate leagues.

“I’ve observed a substantial transformation in the behavior and attitudes of the young people in communities where the ant’s Frisbee program is active,” says Dr. Deben Bachaspatimayum, a social activist and teacher of peace studies based in Manipur, another state contending with violence in northeast India. “This bottom-up peace-building approach is helping youth discover a society based on equality and justice. ... I’m sure this work done at the grassroots will impact governance in the long run.” 

Anne Pinto-Rodrigues

A mentor engages Manoranjan players in a postgame discussion.

A level playing field

The region is largely peaceful now, but as recently as 2014, outbreaks of violence in Chirang and neighboring areas left over 100 dead and thousands homeless. 

“After the 2014 conflict, we were looking for something that would bring communities together,” says Jennifer Liang, co-founder of the ant. “Something girls could get involved in. ... We found ultimate Frisbee to have a lot of the values we were looking for.” 

It’s a mixed-gender, noncontact, and relatively new sport, meaning everyone in the community would be building their skills from scratch. The game involves two teams of seven players each, who score points by completing passes. There are no referees – instead, players must communicate with each other to call fouls and resolve conflicts.

It’s also a famously easy sport to pick up. “It hardly takes half an hour to learn how to throw and catch,” says Ms. Liang. All this, she and her team surmised, made ultimate the ideal tool for strengthening social cohesion and gender equality in Assam. 

So in 2015, the ant introduced a very simple version of the game to a cluster of villages known as Deosri that had been struggling with violence. This program continues today as the Manoranjan league (meaning “entertainment” in Assamese and several other Indian languages). The league recruits young people between the ages of 11 and 14. Team members all come from the same village and, as a result, tend to be from the same ethnic group. The challenge is learning to work with the opposite gender. 

“Initially in these villages, the boys were skeptical about being in a mixed-gender team,” says Ms. Liang. “In due course, they realized that the girls are equally important.”

Anne Pinto-Rodrigues

Sonali Ray (right) tosses the disc during an ultimate game organized by the nonprofit the ant in Rowmari village, India. She credits the sport with building her confidence and counteracting some of the negative messages she received as a young girl.

At the end of each play session, the community youth mentor engages the players in discussions about fair play, school attendance, and other age-specific topics. 

Manoranjan players can graduate to the more competitive Rainbow league, where the ant introduces more rules to promote peace building. Each team must include players from a minimum of three different villages, three different ethnicities, and three different mother tongues.

“It’s so heartening to see friendships developing between players from different communities,” says Ms. Liang. Rainbow sessions end with group discussions on burning social issues like child marriage and suicide.

Since 2018, the ant has partnered with the Ultimate Players Association of India (UPAI) to develop the sport via local and regional tournaments. Former chief operating officer Manickam Narayanan says that you won’t find the most technically impressive players in Chirang – at least not yet – but “the way they conduct themselves and the spirit of the game they exhibit is very inspiring.” 

Mr. Narayanan calls out one team from Chirang that participated in the National Championships in late February, noting that the strongest players were the girls. “The boys accept and appreciate the fact that girls are a key part of the team,” he says.

Ultimate success

Playing with the ant has been particularly transformative for Sonali Ray and Phungbili Basumatary. In 2019, both girls qualified to be part of the national team traveling to the 2020 World Junior Ultimate Championships in Sweden. That tournament was canceled due to COVID-19, but Ms. Ray and Ms. Basumatary had already become role models. In an area where families are often reluctant to enroll their daughters in sports, Ms. Liang says the duo’s success put many parents’ minds at ease.

Anne Pinto-Rodrigues

Phungbili Basumatary and her parents reflect on her ultimate career. In an area where families are often reluctant to enroll their daughters in sports, league coordinators say her success helps put parents’ minds at ease.

UPAI expects to send an India team to the 2025 junior championship, and depending on their performance, Ms. Ray and Ms. Basumatary will have a chance to try out for the national team again. In the meantime, the girls continue to play in the ant’s Rainbow league while also attending school. They coach ultimate, too, and travel to different villages encouraging youth to pick up a flying disc.

Ms. Ray credits the sport with building her confidence and counteracting some of the negative messages she received as a young girl. “Growing up, I used to be very scared,” she says. “In school, if I didn’t understand something, I wouldn’t ask the teacher any questions. ... By playing this sport, I’ve learnt that girls can be as successful as the boys.”

The way they see their neighbors has changed as well.

“The mixed-community team structure has taught me so much,” says Ms. Basumatary, who hails from Assam’s majority-Bodo Thuribari village. “Since we have to self-officiate, I’ve also learnt to say sorry whenever I make a mistake.”

Ms. Ray, who’s part of Durgapur village’s Rajbongshi ethnic group, had a similar journey. Before bringing ultimate to the region, “there were times we would tell children from other communities or religions not to play with us,” she says, with great remorse. “Now I treat everyone equally.”

Although ubiquitous in America, Frisbees and other flying discs are available only in one sporting goods store in Assam’s capital city. Ms. Liang hopes that in the future, discs will become available in every village shop, as easy to come by as a soccer ball.

“My dream is that Frisbee doesn’t remain a nonprofit-led program, but rather something all children can play,” says Ms. Liang.

Sarah Willis

Terah Shelton Harris is the author of "One Summer in Savannah."

Terah Shelton Harris spends her days reading books for a living. Since the Alabama-based librarian and travel writer is surrounded by the brilliant words of others, it only makes sense that she would eventually craft her own prose. Ms. Harris was featured in a debut authors panel at the Publishers Weekly U.S. Book Show in May, where she spoke about her novel, “One Summer in Savannah,” which was published July 4. It is a novel about love and loss, and it deals with the sensitive subject of sexual assault. Monitor staff writer Ira Porter sat down with Ms. Harris in New York for a brief chat.

If there is one sentence or paragraph that sums up the book, what would it be?

It’s about a woman who conceived a child via sexual assault and has to decide whether or not to allow her attacker’s family into her daughter’s life.

What was your motivation for writing it?

There were two events that served as motivation for this book. The [Charleston,] South Carolina, church shooting [in which nine people were murdered in a 2015 hate crime], and days after that event, the survivors, they forgave the shooter. And that’s when I realized I know nothing about forgiveness, because I was shocked that they forgave them. And they basically taught me that there’s nothing that you can’t forgive, when I thought that there were things, acts, behaviors, crimes that, you know, it was fine not to forgive. And then the second event was when I learned from someone really close to me that she conceived a child through sexual assault. She used the words and she practices the act of forgiveness every day. So I had a theme after I discovered the South Carolina church shooting, but I didn’t have a story. She basically gave me the story that I needed when she said that she practiced the act of forgiveness every day. 

You’re a librarian. How close is this book to what you read as a librarian?

I read hundreds of books for work, for pleasure every year, and I am drawn to stories that stick out, stories that I’ve never read before, something that’s different. Recently [I read] “Chain-Gang All-Stars” [by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah], “House of Cotton” [by Monica Brashears], “Adelaide” [by Genevieve Wheeler] – those are stories that really resonated [with] something [inside] me, that stuck out. That’s when I realized that if I was to ever write a book, I wanted to write something that would stick out as well, something that people have never really either heard of before or read something similar to that. My patrons are also drawn to those stories. They love the tried-and-true dedicated writers in the John Grishams and James Pattersons, but they also seek debut authors and they also seek those unique stories. I wanted to be able to offer my patrons something like that.

What are your thoughts on the current threats to close libraries and punish librarians for letting people borrow certain books?  

Banning books has consequences, and it’s not the consequences that people think of. When someone decides to pull a book off the shelf, you’re basically saying that this information is not readily available to the person that needs it the most. But also when that happens, when librarians fight against this [and] they do not pull the books off the shelf, their funding is threatened. My library is funded by the state, the county, and the city. If the city pulled our funding, we would not have a library. There are consequences that come along with that. Libraries, I love to say, are about more than books. 

I’m a collection development librarian, but I’m also the deputy director of my library. There are so many things that I do, that we do, that have nothing to do with books. My library circulates 30 hot spots that provide internet access to people at home, and they can check out the hot spot and have internet for two weeks at home. You know, they don’t talk about the women that come in and thank us, that just had a child and say, “Thank you for having this hot spot, because I take classes from home and I can’t bring my child to the library because she’d be too loud.” 

You know, when you close libraries, when you cut funding, that’s what you’re cutting. My library is a rural library, so we are also passport agents. When you cut funding and my library closes, where would people go to get passports? We’re also notaries. In my state, they stopped notarizing marriage certificates for same-sex couples, so they come to the library to get married. Where would they go if we were notaries but we didn’t do that? So that’s an unexpected consequence that people don’t think about when they think about banning books and protecting the children. But what about everything else that libraries do that will be affected if they cut the funding?

What are your writing habits?

I love to write anywhere I can. I keep a notebook in my car, in my purse, everywhere. I write whenever I can. My characters speak to me, so I don’t see scenes in my head. I can be at my desk or at lunch or taking a walk, and the characters speak to me. I’ll just write them down. I just document what is being said to me and being told to me as it’s being fed to me. I write at night, because I work a full-time job. ... I’m up pretty early in the morning, so I like to write in the morning, but I don’t necessarily agree that you should write every day. Whenever it’s available to you and whenever you can. I just write whenever the character starts speaking to me.

As a debut author, why should people gravitate toward you? Why should they read your book?

I love that question, because “One Summer in Savannah” will be unlike anything that they’ve read before. It’s different. It’s heavy. And we bring a piece of our history to everything that we read, but I would ask for people to take a chance and to be open-minded about a topic that is rarely covered in fiction. Conception after sexual assault is rarely covered in fiction, and it’s something different. It’s also eye opening to people when they started reading because they didn’t think about the consequences of something like this. It’s giving a voice to all the Saras of the world who people don’t realize are out there. Some of the research that I did, I was talking to a specialist about the number of women that conceived children through sexual assault, and she said, “Whatever number you find, double it,” because there’s not accurate numbers because so many of these cases go unreported. If people are interested in reading and learning about unfortunate circumstances that happen to people, then they can pick up “One Summer in Savannah.”

What are you currently reading? 

I just finished “Chain-Gang All-Stars.” That book was so fascinating to me. And I just downloaded “Lone Women” [by Victor LaValle], and I’ll finish that today. I’m actually behind on my reading. 

AP

A demonstrator in the Paris suburb of Nanterre runs during violent protests sparked by the fatal police shooting of a 17-year-old driver.

The riots that swept across France following the police killing of a teenager of Arab descent last week in a Paris suburb renewed long-standing concerns about racism in law enforcement. But as the unrest subsides, French society is grappling with a perhaps more unsettling question: Why would children as young as 12 years old participate in frenzies of destructive violence?

At least 3,354 people were arrested during six days of rioting. Their average age is 17, the government reported. That is prompting soul-searching among local officials, teachers, parents, religious leaders, and organizers of community initiatives for youth. The violence requires more than policy solutions, “but also the human [touch],” as one mayor, Anne Vignot, mayor of Besançon, said – starting with empathy.

“If we’re going to get out of this situation,” Mounira Chatti, a professor at Bordeaux Montaigne University, told the Monitor, “the government needs to send a very strong signal to young people from immigrant backgrounds: You belong to this country; you have your place here.”

The “situation” that Professor Chatti notes is well studied. Immigrants, mostly of North African origin, make up 10% of the French population. The share is even larger when French-born descendants of immigrants are counted. They are concentrated in crowded, low-income suburban communities called banlieues, where public services and opportunities for economic advancement lag far behind the national average.

Roughly 57% of children in these communities live in poverty, compared with 21% in the broader French population, according to the Paris-based Montaigne Institute, and residents are three times more likely to be unemployed.

Social and economic inequality is compounded by what Human Rights Watch has described as “longstanding and widespread ethnic profiling that constitutes systemic discrimination” by the police. The riots last week were touched off by an incident critics say is all too frequent: police harassment of youth on the basis of race or ethnicity.

Those conditions mask a positive trend, however. According to official statistics, roughly 10% of banlieue residents relocate to better communities each year. While that sliver of upward mobility does not undo the need for greater investment in communities of poor immigrants, it points to the social adhesive many are seeking to renew amid the youth crisis reflected in the riots.

“It’s the combined and blended words of just about everyone: the teacher, the activity leader, the imam, the father, the mother, a multitude of players,” Youcef Achmaoui, the imam of Garges-lès-Gonesse, a community in the north of Paris, told Le Monde newspaper. “That’s what makes [youth] think things over.”