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

"In high school, I was always a disciplined student, but I was always bored because the material just didn't seem to speak to me. It was from this Eurocentric point of view"--a term she admits she learned in college. But then, that's precisely the point.

"It's not as if people don't have these feelings--they feel marginalized in high school, but they don't have a language to express it," Phillips explains. "In these classes, I developed a language to express my experiences and describe my place in the world. And it was so powerful. It made what I was feeling more valid, more legitimate."

Phillips moved quickly from finding a language to express her place in the world to joining with like-minded women to express their discontent with Spelman's "ultraconservative" former president, Dr. Audrey Manley. And with the newly inaugurated Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum at Spelman's helm, Phillips is moving full steam ahead into other issues in which she's passionately interested: Roe v. Wade, the war and getting out the vote in 2004. "This is such a crucial time," she says.

For Johnson, meanwhile, the pivotal moment appears to be now. She helped organize an affirmative action teach-in as a midterm project in her "African American Communities" class. Inspired by the speaker, Shanta Driver, the executive director of the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration and to Fight for Equality By Any Means Necessary (BAMN), she suddenly found herself coordinating the affirmative action protest trip to Washington.

"It was just something that was very personal to me," says Johnson, who's double-majoring in pre-med and history and minoring in Jewish studies.

Of that momentous day in the capital, she now says, "I couldn't believe I was actually marching down Constitution Avenue. It was so amazing. I was exercising my First Amendment rights; the Constitution was working in my favor for a change ...

"That was something my ancestors could not do, but I felt so strongly I was standing on their shoulders--and following in my mother and father's footsteps, too," Johnson says, adding that her parents took part in the 1963 March on Washington.

THE NEW STUDENT POLITICS

"Think globally--act locally." One doesn't see those bumper stickers quite so frequently now, but that may well be because it's an ethic that's been completely absorbed by this generation of students.

Indeed, one survey estimates that this may be the most socially activist generation of students since the 1930s. Arthur Levine and Jeanette S. Cureton found in their 1998 study, "When Hope and Fear Collide: A Portrait of Today's Students," that nearly two out of three undergraduates (64 percent of the 9,100 surveyed) were involved in activism. But these days, it's not just the issues that are different. So are the actions that students take.

"What we're seeing is that students are much more interested in volunteerism than in political action," says Campus Compact's Hollander. "What they've told us is, `Our service work is not an alternative to politics--it is alternative politics. If we haven't touched it, we can't understand it. We need to touch it to know how to make it better.'"