More on Student Activism

Following up on the previous post "Is Student Activism Dead?":

For an article in our April 2006 special 35th Anniversary edition of THE BLACK COLLEGIAN, reporter Shawn Chollette interviewed several African-American college students from diverse backgrounds, regions, and institutions around the country about the scene on campus and the concerns of the peers.

While the two-part Today's Black Collegians feature was not specifically about political / social activism, Chollette did ask his subjects about political concerns on campus. We were interested to hear students describe just how powerfully Hurricane Katrina -- in patricular, the fiasco in responding to the devastation in New Orleans well after the storm -- had motivated their peers even on campuses that were not in the affected Gulf region.

The disaster seems to have reawakened a national consciousness of race and class disparities that, as author Anne Rice observes in her own commentary, were always a part of life in multicultural New Orleans. The effect, however, seems to have been particularly pronounced among African-American students everywhere, especially as they have had opprotunities to interact with peers who had been displaced and found accommodations on their campuses.

The impulse to provide community service or charitable donations to assist in Hurricane relief and rebuilding, though commendable, is not the same as activism. One question we hope to explore in a series of upcoming readings later this year is whether or not current events -- including the Gulf disasters -- have had a widespread, lasting effect on students' interest and engagement in the political sphere.

Could Katrina be contributing to social seachange that we will look back on later and recognize as a distinct generational Movement?

We don't have the answers, but again the editors will be inviting feedback from our readers and site visitors.