Activists for the NEW MILLENNIUM
Complacent and politically unaware? Student leaders say young people are screaming, but no one is listening.
By Kendra Hamilton
Baghdad is burning, and the streets of the world’s cities are full of anti-war protesters — as well as anti-globalization protesters, anti-sweatshop protesters, campus “greens” and much more — but some observers are asking, where are the Black student protesters? When anti-globalization protests paralyzed the nation’s capital during the G-8 Summit last year, for example, the Washington Post dispatched a reporter to Howard University’s campus to find out “why Black students don’t care about globalization.”
African American elders, meanwhile, seem to be echoing the criticisms. Sessions at a recent Black studies conference co-sponsored by the Schomburg Center, Princeton University and the City University of New York revealed a “profound” rift between the activist generation of the ’60s and ’70s and today’s youth, noted the Schomburg’s chief, Dr. Howard Dodson (see Black Issues, March 13).
“What I hear from people is that we don’t know our history, we don’t take education seriously, we’re more into the way we look — the bling-bling! — than what’s inside,” says Descatur “Dez” Potier, 22, president of the Black Student Union and a senior political science major at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn. “But a lot of people from that [activist] generation just haven’t taken the time to understand and relate to us.”
