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Bhumika Muchhala, a recent graduate who is now working full-time in USAS’s national office, says anti-sweatshop activism can be “cliquish.” She describes a close-knit, white hippie activist culture that is “not welcoming to people of color.” … Dave Thurston, a black USAS activist who attends CUNY’s Hunter College, agrees that the organization can be inhospitably white and middle-class, semi-indignantly citing the all-vegan food at conferences. “Oh my fucking word,” he sighs, “and twinkling!” (Twinkling is a hand gesture that comes from the Quakers, used to signify assent without disrupting the meeting or repeating what they’ve said; while many find it useful, it can feel alienating to outsiders, and is often cited as a symbol of the odd, cultish behavior of white activists.)
–Liza Featherstone, Students Against Sweatshops, 2001.
“Biologists and anthropologists now agree that dividing humanity into different races is fabricated and fraudulent; racial categories are scientific fictions. Yet scientific fictions can become social facts with deadly consequences. Malcolm used to say that racism was like a Cadillac, they make a new model every year. Just as it is impossible to fix a 1990s Cadillac with a 1960s owner’s manual, we will not address the racism of the 1990s and beyond with a 1960s philosophy and approach. Our challenge is to develop a civil rights vision appropriate to our own time, to the challenges presented to us by the injustices inscribed in our everyday lives through racial inequality.”
— George Lipsitz, “Libraries and Memories: Beyond White Privilege 101.”
Yesterday I tweeted a link to a photo of a 1967 sit-in at Duke University, but it wasn’t until just now that I followed up to see the story behind the protest.
Wow.
In the fall of 1967, the Duke student government proposed a regulation that would have barred student organizations from patronizing segregated off-campus establishments. The regulation was put to the Duke student body in a referendum … and it failed by a 60-40 margin.
In response to the vote, members of the campus Afro-American Society staged a sit-in in the hallway outside the offices of the university president, and the university senate quickly agreed to impose the ban that the students had rejected.
The Civil Rights Act banned discrimination in public accommodations in 1964, but Duke had not enrolled its first black undergraduate students until the fall of 1963, and the university did not hire its first black professor until 1966, so it’s perhaps not surprising that the college’s white student majority would still be so hostile to integration in 1967.
Shocking, perhaps, but not surprising.
Hendrik Hertzberg blogs about Breach of Peace, a new book on the 1961 Freedom Riders. I was going to quote from his piece, but I kept cutting and pasting more and more of it, so go read what he has to say. It looks like an amazing book about an amazing moment in American history.
I’ve come across three pieces of writing about Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) in the last couple of weeks, and they’re all worth passing along.
First, an article from the New York Times about the devastating effect that the current economic downturn is having on HBCUs. Second, a personal reminiscence from an HBCU alum. And finally, a response to that reminiscence. The third piece, a short post by Ta-Nehisi Coates of the Atlantic, produced a comment thread that’s well worth reading for its own sake.
studentactivism.net 
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