By Daraka Larimore-Hall and Tracie McMillan
College students spending their summers working side-by-side with union organizers. National attention on issues of free trade and globalization. International meetings being shut down amidst clouds of tear gas. Universities insisting on sweatshop-free apparel. It's all part and parcel of the young activist landscape in 2001, but just a few years ago, the student movement was merely sputtering.
Except for the occasional flare up around attacks by the Right, there wasn't much going on on the national scene," explains Jessica Shearer, a former Young Democratic Socialists co-chair and now an organizer with the Service Employees International Union. "In those days, getting students to do any kind of activism was like pulling teeth. Especially anything to do with labor rights or globalization, two of the issues I was particularly interested in."
Media coverage of student activism over the last few years will show you without flinching that labor rights and globalization are the bread and butter of today's college activism. In just the last two years, the World TradeOrganization meetings collapsed in a cloud of tear gas, Harvard students forced their administration to the bargaining table with SEIU janitors, and "sweat-free" campuses (where no apparel bearing the uniersity logo is made under sweatshop conditions) have practically become a household word. Kids today are active, engaged, and taking on struggles that span the globe.
But for all its successes, the new student movement is facing some heady problems-and they're not exactly new ones. Activists' lack of attention to issues of race and racism, as well as a tendency to de-emphasis of strategic, "broad picture" thinking in favor of action for action's sake, has generated growing debate within, and criticism from outside, the movement. As the "new movment" grows up, one thing is crystal clear: issues of race and strategy will be what make or break the movement.
In 2001, student activism is sharply divided along racial lines (save for some large public schools in California), with a predominantly white anti-corporate sector and a people of color-based movement focused on anti-racism and defense of civil rights. But while activists of the former have graced the front pages of everything from the New York Times to the Nation, far less attention has been paid to the rise of student and youth resistance to the conservative rollback of civil rights throughout the United States. In California, New York and elsewhere students have mobilized to fight education cuts, increased criminalization and the attack on affirmative action
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