“Black people are pushed to the side of the American agenda, and we think it is unfair,” said Morehouse College junior Avery Jackson, one of the organizers behind #AUCShutItDown, who added that Blacks in this country “are just as American as everyone else.”
Shiranthi Goonathilaka, a senior at Spelman College, said “We didn’t want to hear regurgitated rhetoric around Black issues” or a recitation of the problems. “She just gave us an overview of Black issues but didn’t really give us any solutions.”
“We live in the community. We deal with these issues every day. We don’t need to be lectured. We need solutions,” Goonathilaka said.
Jackson said the students also resented the fact that “there were more VIPs and more elites than there were students” allowed in Clark Atlanta’s Leonidas S. Epps Gymnasium for the rally, which the students took as meaning “she didn’t really prioritize the people whose space she was in.”
There have been mixed reactions to the protests, but Goonathilaka and Jackson said the members of #AUCShutItDown are unfazed by any negative response.
“We respect intellectual differences on … the methods we take [to get the point across], but what we will not tolerate is the discrediting of ours,” Jackson said.
