You are currently browsing the category archive for the ‘Race’ category.
Columbia Law School is hosting an Alliance of Youth Movements Summit right now, with all sessions being broadcast live on the net. As the summit website puts it:
Panels will discuss a variety of practical topics, including How To Build Transnational Social Movements Using New Technology, How To Use New Mobile Technologies and How To Preserve Group Safety And Security.
Summit participants will also be honored at a red-carpet event with entertainment celebrities, business leaders, and civil society figures at the former home of MTV’s Total Request Live (“TRL”) overlooking Times Square.
Howcast will use the field manual for youth empowerment developed at the Summit as the cornerstone of a much larger online “hub,” where emerging youth organizations can access and share “how-to” guides and tips on how to use social-networking and other technologies to promote freedom and justice and counter violence, extremism and oppression. The hub will include instructional videos and text guides, links to related online resources and discussion forums for sharing experiences, ideas and advice.
The schedule for the summit is available here, with links to streaming video from every session.
The student government of Carelton University in Ottawa, Canada has withdrawn from a national cystic fibrosis fundraising campaign on the grounds that the disease’s sufferers are too white and too male.
In a resolution, the student government declared that cystic fibrosis “has been recently revealed to only affect white people, and primarily men.” (A representative of the Canadian Cystic Fibrosis Foundation says both of these claims are false.)
Public comment on the decision was swift and harsh, with one columnist at the conservative National Post calling the resolution “a new low … even by the loopy standards of student governments.”
Students at Carelton have launched a drive to impeach the president of the student government, as well as a faculty adviser to the group the student government member who drafted the resolution.
December 3 Update: The Carelton student government has apologized for the resolution, and pledged to increase fundraising for cystic fibrosis. See our followup story here.
An effigy of Barack Obama was found hanged from a tree on the campus of the University of Kentucky today. The effigy was discovered and reported by a faculty member early this morning, and an investigation by campus and local police is underway.
In a statement, UK president Lee Todd called the act “despicable.”
This is the second such incident to occur on a college campus this year. In late September, an effigy of Obama was hanged on the campus of George Fox University, a small Christian college in Oregon.
At the 1967 Congress of the US National Student Association (NSA), the delegates present passed a resolution endorsing the Black Power movement, which they defined as a struggle for the unification and liberation of black people in America “by any means necessary.”
These last four words got a lot of attention.
One of the most prominent attacks on the resolution came from the New York Times, In an editorial entitled “Appeasing Negro Extremists.” The resolution, the Times declared, was “morally … inexcusable” because it was “insincere.” Surely the members of NSA did not, it continued, “believe that American Negroes have the right to seek something called ‘liberation’ by murder, arson and other terror tactics,” as “the phrase ‘by any means necessary’ clearly implies.”
A few days later Ed Schwartz, NSA’s newly elected president, replied in a letter to the editor.
The Black Power resolution had, Schwartz noted, made no reference to “murder, arson, and other terror tactics.” Its authors had deliberately left the phrase vague, leaving it “to the reader of the resolution to determine what means will be necessary to achieve social progress in this country.”
“If the Times believes,” he continued, “that ‘murder, arson and other terror tactics’ have become ‘necessary means’ to social progress, then it should examine why such tactics … have become ‘necessary.’ … Those who predict violence are,” he said, “admitting that we will remain incapable of solving problems of our own creation. The National Student Association is unwilling to make such an admission.”
Morehouse College in Atlanta is the only all-male historically black college in the United States. This spring, for the first time in its 141-year history, its valedictorian is a white man.
MSNBC has the story, and the blog Stereohyped has some thoughts. (Both links via Racialicious.)
studentactivism.net 
Recent Comments