R.I.P.: The Tired Myth of the Apathetic Black Student
We should all be finally noticing the new — really the old — Black student activism and it’s been a long time coming.
After watching #BlackLivesMatter blossom among American youth, after watching Black student protest after protest — most recently at the University of Missouri and Yale University — literally sweep the nation over the last few years, we should all be finally noticing the new (really the old) Black student activist.
And I am thrilled. It’s been a long time coming.
Over the last three years, I have had the opportunity to travel around the country and talk about my first book and share the story of the Black Campus Movement from 1965 to 1972. During this national social movement, Black students and their allies at upward of a thousand historically Black and White colleges organized, demanded and protested for progressive Black universities, Black studies, Black cultural centers, Black student affairs officers, and Black faculty, staff, coaches and students — you name it students probably demanded it. The Brown v. Board of Education decision did not integrate higher education. It was the Black Campus Movement that integrated higher education.
But not all Black students powered the Black Campus Movement. A large portion of Black students — especially at colleges with large Black student enrollments — did not support the Black student unions, did not get behind the demands, did notattend the rallies, did not put themselves out there in protest, did not mind spying on the activists for administrators and cops. We forget and marginalize and individualize those apathetic Black students of yesterday, and we highlight and center and generalize those apathetic Black students of today.
So, invariably, wherever I go and speak on the Black Campus Movement, the same question is posed during the question and answer period: “Why are Black students so apathetic today?”
It is always a really difficult question for me to answer. For a long time, I was conflicted on the premise. I was conflicted on whether Black students today are indeed apathetic. The bad historian in me kept comparing today’s Black students to their predecessors in the 1960s. The seemingly logical side of me kept comparing the number of protests today to the number of protests in the 1960s.
For a long time, it made total sense to me that today’s Black student is apathetic (compared to the Afro-donning, Black power-intoning, Black student union-forming, Black studies-demanding, administration building-barricading Black student of 1969).
It is important to learn from the past. Our history is fundamentally our first lesson book. But every good historian will tell R.I.P.: The Tired Myth of the Apathetic Black Student - Higher Education:
