Meet the New Student ActivistsPosted in Articles, Campus Life, Media Archive, United States on 2016-02-10 02:18Z by Steven |
Meet the New Student Activists
The New York Times
2016-02-01
As told to Abby Ellin
Young African-Americans and their allies are demanding change, leading people of all backgrounds to talk about issues that have lain dormant for decades. What do they want? Inclusion and representation — now. Here, seven students talk about the problems, the protests and themselves.
AMANDA BENNETT University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa
Bio: Senior, English/African-American studies; co-organizer of We Are Done movement; producer and co-author of “How Does It Feel to Be a Problem” video
My Story: I am totally African-American. My grandfather was a sharecropper in rural Alabama who moved to Atlanta and became a mechanic and worker at General Motors, so I grew up in Atlanta around middle-class black people. To come to Alabama and see this kind of segregation was horrifying to me. A lot of people who were impoverished 50 years ago, around the time of Selma, are still impoverished… .Nothing has changed structurally…
…NAILAH HARPER-MALVEAUX, Yale University
 “Black women are at the bottom of the totem pole. When you free women of color, you free everyone.” — Nailah Harper-Malveaux Credit Fred R. Conrad for The New York Times |
Bio: Senior, American studies/theater studies; director of theatrical productions that tell the stories of African-Americans
My Story: I’ve been surrounded by social justice and law my whole life. My mom is a civil rights lawyer turned law professor at Catholic University, while my dad is U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Human Rights Council. My dad is Cherokee and Macanese, from Macau, and my mom is Creole, a mixture of Spanish and black descent. I don’t look white but I don’t look black, either. I identify as Indian and black. Because I’m mixed I have been very conscious of race my whole life, which is probably why I’ve participated in so many political events at Yale, including the midnight march to walk the demands to the president’s house. It was very empowering…
Read the entire article here.