Activists for the new millennium: complacent and politically unaware? Student leaders say young people are screaming, but no one is listening - Cover Story

Black Issues in Higher Education, April 24, 2003 by Kendra Hamilton

"The older generation thinks we're supposed to resist in the same way that they did, but things are not the same. We have different interests. Even the concept of the Black community has changed since the civil rights movement," she says. "There are a lot of people involved in gay rights--and that's something that at one time you just could not talk about or deal with. There's a growing number of students who consider themselves feminist as well."

THE MAKING OF AN ACTIVIST

In the "golden age of activism," students became politicized by direct experience. They went to segregated schools, drank from segregated drinking fountains. They watched dogs and men with water cannons attacking unarmed marchers on television. They saw body bags returning from Vietnam, entered the draft lottery and faced that terrible decision: Fight or flee.

Students of the current generation are politicized, by contrast, by their schools.

Sometimes the critical experiences come in high school. That was certainly the case for Potier and Candice Smith, 21, a senior politics major at Hendrix College in Conway, Ark.

For Potier, a Haitian American whose mother is quite active with the immigrant community in his hometown of Boston, the key experiences were an African American history course at his high school, the prestigious Buckingham Browne & Nichols School in Cambridge, Mass., and a week in the Anytown program, a weeklong diversity conference for student leaders.

"You could say that experience pushed me over the edge," Potier explains. "We were placed in workshops where we'd have to face issues of diversity across a wide gamut, forcing us to develop an understanding of women's issues, homophobia and heterosexism, ableism. The most important thing I learned was that when you see an injustice, if you don't step up and say what's going on is wrong, you're almost as bad as the person inflicting the injustice. That's always stayed with me."

Smith, on the other hand, is a proud graduate of Little Rock's Central High School. Her keen awareness of her high school's civil rights history fueled her interest in the Young Democrats. She was the vice president for minority affairs for the state of Arkansas her sophomore year in college and sought a series of leadership posts at her 92-percent White campus.

Smith and a handful of other African American students led a campaign to integrate the college's student senate. After the group managed to win nearly half of the 15 seats, Smith survived an impeachment campaign and enough smear tactics "to make you think Machiavelli had come back to life," she says with a laugh. But she remained positive and stayed the course. "I like being a trendsetter, breaking down barriers. That's how I approach life," she says, noting that she's currently the president of the Pre-Law Society.

For Phillips and Johnson, the consciousness-raising came a bit later.

Phillips was a freshman at Spelman taking two required courses, "The African Diaspora and the World" and "Introduction to Women's Studies."