the kids are all right

the students are talking, do we have the courage to listen?

Before we get into today’s piece, I want to remind you that THIS SUNDAY there will be a sharing circle, which means you’ll get to spend an hour on zoom with me! Our special guest is my sweet friend Soraya Chemaly, who just wrote a must-read op-ed about the resilience of protestors, and she will be talking to us about, you guessed it… resilience (she just wrote a whole book about it!) Our live events take a lot of work, and that’s why they’re exclusively for paid subscribers. Your subscription helps pay the rent for zoom, and cover the overhead cost of running our community. So don’t forget to become a paid subscriber so that you get access to the link and don’t miss out. Thank you for your valuable contribution and your investment in our community.

“An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior.” -Viktor Frankl

When I was nineteen, I was part of the vibrant student movement in Québec. Armed with the innocent belief that we could change the world, we occupied school buildings for almost two months over steep budget cuts to education. We went on strike for weeks, refused to go to class, delayed graduation, trespassed and protested almost every single day, to put pressure on the government to meet our demands. No classes, no exams, no evaluations, not until we were heard. We had so many contentious encounters with the police that we stopped counting. We blocked streets, bridges and prevented all of our school administrators to go on with their regular business. On March 19th (my 20th birthday) 80,000 of us marched in the streets of Montréal. We were criticized for disrupting the peace, when what we were trying to communicate was that the status quo was never peaceful at all.

Photo by Shalom de León on Unsplash

I see many similarities with the student protest movement unfolding on campuses across the country and the world, with one major difference: our civil disobedience wasn’t over our school potentially profiting off a violent war, it was over student loans. While the issue is certainly tied to racism and systemic inequality, the issue didn’t involve the death of thousands of innocent civilians and a military assault creating the most child amputees in history.

That’s why when I see some of the partisan pearl-clutching around Columbia students protesting the war by renaming the Hamilton building after Hind, a five-year-old girl who was killed in Gaza, I feel disoriented. As Chris Hayes wrote on Twitter, in the grand scheme of American protests, this isn’t shocking, it’s frankly normal.

Back in 1968, 700 students were arrested for occupying the very same hall at Columbia over the war in Vietnam and civil rights issues. “When I heard about the Hamilton Hall takeover in response to the student suspensions, I thought: Oh wow, this seems very much like what was happening back then. It’s very much like what I saw,” Mark Naison told NBC News. Naison is a history professor at Fordham University and participated in the 1968 protests at Columbia. Buildings were also taken over during demonstrations against South-Africa’s Apartheid regime in 1977, and again more recently in 2014 after the brutal killing of Micheal Brown.

Photo by Unseen Histories on Unsplash

While all of these protest movements have a lot in common (namely that they’re about racism, imperialism and that the US government tried to violently repress them) they also contain major differences. The current anti-war protests are happening within the backdrop of rising Antisemitic and Islamophobic incidents on campuses. Many students don’t feel safe, which started long before the encampments began. Many Muslim students are worried about wearing a Hijab and Jewish students are hiding their Star of David necklaces. While those protesting Israel’s war include Jewish students and that many encampments even include shabbat celebrations, antisemites are using these movements to spew hatred on an already targeted community with a history of persecution. Every person should feel safe walking on campus, and the fact that so many students don’t, is a failure on the part of those institutions. And it goes without saying that this won’t be solved by further militarizing our schools.

As the Publisher of The Ink Anand Giridharadas poignantly said on Morning Joe, “students have a long history of telling vital truths that others are too afraid or too paid to say.” No protest movement is perfect, and expecting them to be is to forget what kind of imperfect activism this country was built on. We forget that the anti-war protestors of the 1960s and 1970s were unpopular too. We also fail to remember that protesting police brutality and waving a #BlackLivesMatter sign in 2014 was also viewed as radical, before the CEO of Nike and many other mainstream organizations tweeted the same slogan six years later. If we look back at every inflection point in history where enormous progress was made, we can find half of the population opposing it vociferously.

“Students have a long history of telling vital truths that others are too afraid or too paid to say.” -Anand Giridharadas

So while we must stand against any kind of intimidation against Jewish and Muslim students, we can’t let that prevent us from listening. We can’t let the tactics get in the way of the message, especially since this is a generation that’s been left with very few options to make their voices heard. Gen Z are coming of age during a time of extreme uncertainty where their own representatives have failed to protect them from armed gunmen in their schools, from predatory social media companies and climate catastrophe. They’ve also been hounded by those in power. After all, they’ve been accused of being “coddled” and “lazy” by the very politicians who are now painting them as calculated violent anarchists. Which one is it? Are young people overly sensitive snowflakes or rapacious ruffians? Surely, they can’t be both.

Gen Z are told they’re lazy and aimless by the very politicians who are now painting them as calculated violent anarchists. Which one is it? Are young people overly sensitive snowflakes or rapacious ruffians?

Just like every other protest movement, this one will be remembered more fondly than it is received at the time of its inception. So we can either be interested and open, or repressive and intolerant. History will remember these two opposing forces, so the only question is, which one would you rather be apart of?