The Kids Are Alright
Today’s youth activism is better than that of the ’60s. Too bad one young journalist doesn’t get it.
By Tim Fernholz
November 27, 2007
AP Photo/Nick Ut“Do you think this is the right stereotype?” asked the journalist. “I don’t want it to be all funky when we pin it on.”
“Looks good to me,” her editor said, without even glancing at the article.
Meet the new face of journalism’s anti-youth activism movement. Courtney Martin, a young author, speaker, and adjunct professor, has recently penned a series of articles for the American Prospect attempting to document the political proclivities of Generation Y, the Millenials, or, in short, us kids. Her latest, “The Problem With Youth Activism,” shows just how far she is from understanding what the current generation is doing.
Martin would like to see today’s young activists adopt the tactics of the 1960’s student radicals—protests, theatrics, and the like. Martin’s complaint is that young people today are too complacent, too safe, and too co-opted by "the man." We’re just not angry enough, she argues. But today’s young activists are angry—they’re just too busy attempting to create meaningful change to sit around waving signs. Martin, despite her travels around the country speaking to college students, doesn’t understand what a new generation of activists is doing to effect political change. In fact, she doesn’t even understand who today’s young activists are.
There’s no doubt that too many Americans, young and old, are apathetic about politics and the world around them. But the fact is that young people are politically active on and off campus and more involved than many other demographic groups around the country. If you judge by their voting patterns, activism, organizing, and use of new technology, young people today are doing more now than in previous decades. Martin says we need to take advantage of our “raw power—the priceless power of being young and mad.” We already are young and mad, but we’re smart, too. Young progressives have moved beyond superficial displays of anger to spend more time changing the world than complaining about it. This isn’t to discount the strides our forebears made in the golden age of the student movement; it’s simply time to realize we don’t have to fight their battles all over again.
Martin’s first mistake is to restrict her view of young people to those who attend universities—the ones she has met. Mike Connery, a blogger who focuses on young people’s role in contemporary politics, points out that only 21 percent of all 18-29 year-olds currently attend college; even fewer are enrolled at the elite institutions at which Martin speaks. Two recent examples of successful youth activism were driven by activists who don’t fit Martin’s mold: The protests in support of the Jena 6 were brought to national attention thanks to youth-produced online campaigns, and the massive immigration protests in 2006 were successful in part because of online youth organizing, including the more than 100,000 high school students who walked out of class thanks to MySpace organizing. This isn’t to mention work by, for example, the League of Young Voters, an explicitly off-campus organization, and many other groups that engage young people without a campus focus.
But let’s play by Martin’s rules and restrict our definition of "youth activism" to "student activism." Martin conflates cooperation with university administrators with selling out. But today’s college students aren’t dealing with the same school administrators as their ’60s-era counterparts. Many schools retain a commitment to social justice, and when they don’t hold up their end of the bargain, students hold them to it, as with University of Michigan President Mary Sue Coleman and affirmative action. Further, there’s no shame in using university money to agitate, especially, as Connery notes, when students are the ones who distribute it. And, as any organizer knows, it’s not always smart to view the powers-that-be as enemies: Young activists must change administrator’ minds and polices through pressure and sound arguments—not just piss them off.
Martin proves to be completely unaware of the effective student activism taking place today. For example, at my own college, Georgetown University, students have organized a successful living wage campaign that led to the unionization of sub-contracted workers and helped negotiate a raise for security guards. They also started STAND: A Student Anti-Genocide Coalition, an activist group that has chapters on 600 high school and college campuses. LGBTQ students and their allies forced the administration to enact plans to hire a full-time LGBTQ resource coordinator—which is a big deal for a Catholic university. And this is just in the four years that I’ve been here.
Around the country, organizations like Campus Progress fund issue campaigns that are conceived and organized by students on issues from stopping the death penalty and global warming to ending the war in Iraq. Some students have recently organized to support affirmative action. As Connery points out, other students at Harvard University and New York University have protested for a living wage and against bad immigration policies. And these are just the examples that make it into the national media. Despite Martin’s condescension, students who raise awareness of issues large and small on campuses across the country are engaging in meaningful activism, too. This might be part of Martin’s problem: Many community-centric activists aren’t involved in monolithic national movements. But these students aren’t voting on buttons—they’re passionate about working to change the world.
And it’s not just activism. Thanks to the work of our baby-boomer forebears, young people have a place in politics today. They work on political campaigns, in think tanks, and in government. They seek to expose problems and advocate for change through journalism and blogging. They even run for office. They are part of groundbreaking campaigns like the Oregon Bus Project and Forward Montana. Our generation is also taking the lead in online organizing, from Facebook to MySpace. Do you think that the YouTube debate, arguably the best of the election cycle so far, would have happened without our generation’s influence?
The fact is that my generation is more politically active than most in the media realize: Forty-nine percent of youth voters went to the polls in 2004—over a million more youth voted nationwide than seniors. That number has increased for three years straight. In the 2006 mid-term elections, 24 percent of us turned out, to make up 13 percent of the electorate—a four percent increase from the 2002 midterms. More importantly, young Americans voted overwhelmingly for anti-war candidates in congressional races, which led to a change in congressional control. But, for Martin, a change in political control doesn’t count unless someone’s waving a sign.
Martin and other critics of student activism point to the fragmentation of the anti-war movement as key evidence of our generation’s failures. In another piece for the Prospect, filled with similar wishy-washy generalities, Martin laments that our anger about the Iraq war hasn’t resulted in much action to stop it. Of course, she doesn’t suggest what this action ought to be. That’s because there isn’t much agreement on what to do—the war is bad news, but no one from the grassroots up knows the best way to end it. Protests won’t help, especially ones led by fringe groups like ANSWER. Like the generation before them, activists today have helped turn public opinion against the war, and they’ve elected a Congress with a mandate to end it—and it’s taken them about the same amount of time as it did for students in the ’60s. But the executive branch has the most control over foreign policy, and only when its occupant is against the war will we see real progress. Until then, young people must work on defining what type of foreign policy our generation should support. Luckily, some "complacent" college students have already founded an organization dedicated to getting student ideas on policy issues into the public discourse.
Martin says she would rather see young activists spend their time placing “viruses in campus administrators’ computers with pop-up windows demanding no more expansion into poor, local neighborhoods,” creating “mock draft cards [to send] home to their parents,” and organizing “a dance party—1 million youth strong—on the Washington lawn.” All of Martin’s suggestions have one thing in common, besides their sheer inanity (what, exactly, is “the Washington lawn?”): They would achieve nothing, except to further the stereotype that young people don’t understand politics. But then again, neither does Martin. As my generation works out how to make our own impact on the political system, we don’t need a ’60s wannabe telling us we’re not angry enough.
Tim Fernholz is a senior at Georgetown University and Editor-in-Chief of The Georgetown Voice. He is also a member of the Campus Progress Student Advisory Board.
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Comments
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Nail. Hammer. Head.
Great job.
— Mike Connery - Nov 27, 03:44 PM - #I’ve been a fan of Martin’s work in the past (she wrote a great piece on how Americans need more vacation time not too long ago) but I was surprised by the condescending nature of her piece that Tim talks about. My own response was on the Prospect’s site here.
— ksteiger - Nov 27, 04:00 PM - #Excellent. Great writing.
— Craig Berger - Nov 27, 04:42 PM - #brilliant – thank you for this
— ally - Nov 27, 05:37 PM - #I think you’ve summed up this issue perfectly. Some people I’ve chewed over this issue with have argued to me that Georgetown is an anomaly, that the kids who are really active are segregated on our campus and a few others in the ‘top tier’, and everyone at the state schools is just coasting on by. I don’t see that being the case at all, and you did a great job in your piece on highlighting the diverse sources of student/youth activism beyond that narrow prism that so much of the writing in this vein limits itself by.
Props.
— Joe - Nov 27, 05:57 PM - #Just as an aside, because I can’t help myself: In reply to Martin’s argument (linked above by ksteiger) that Americans don’t have enough vacation time, you can get plenty of vacation time — along with job security and a decent salary over time — by focusing all your efforts on becoming a public school-teacher in a relatively posh district. If you want more time off, you just can’t do much better. People have certain priorities and the job market gives them plenty of opportunities to pursue those priorities — I don’t think this is the sort of national problem that cries out for a legislative solution.
— Joe - Nov 27, 06:00 PM - #The Iraq War is a really tough one. Like you pointed out, people just don’t have a cohesive message or strategy about how to get out of there. But actions are sprouting up again after the failure to prevent the surge, and as people like you frame the debate instead of the mainstream media, young people will have more positive messages and success stories to look up to.
— Tanya Paperny - Nov 27, 06:01 PM - #This sentence in Martin’s article struck me as especially problematic:
“Students are surrounded by professors reminiscing about the glory days of youth activism, when groups like Students for a Democratic Society, the Weather Underground, and the Black Panther Party really ignited social change.”
Is this sort of social change—especially in the case of the Weather Underground, a heavily militant (in the violent sense of the word) organization—something to aspire to? Perhaps we college students should be applauded for now seeking a more rational path than blowing things up.
— Ben Regenspan - Nov 27, 06:29 PM - #Re: Joe, Just for clarification, Courtney wasn’t arguing for suburban school teachers to get more vacation time. She was talking about hourly employees who don’t get any vacation time or benefits.
— ksteiger - Nov 27, 10:33 PM - #Kay, you missed my point — I was saying that if vacation time is a high priority for someone, they can pursue a career that compensates them accordingly, and that becoming a public school teacher isn’t exactly an out-of-reach goal for Joe Schmoe American.
If someone’s working a middle class job without a lot of vacation time, well, that’s reflective of their priorities.
— Joe - Nov 28, 12:31 AM - #““But actions are sprouting up again after the failure to prevent the surge, and as people like you frame the debate instead of the mainstream media, young people will have more positive messages and success stories to look up to.”“
I don’t see a compelling argument for why progressives should have tried hard to block the surge — regardless from whether or not it ultimately works. If we’d gotten out of Iraq without trying the surge, the ‘stab in the back’ narrative, that we ‘would have won the war abroad if we hadn’t been defeated at home’, would be a lingering stain on American politics for decades. As it stands, if the surge fails, all but a radical fringe will see that we just plain lost in Iraq, not because of anything the Democrats or the media did but because the Republicans fucked up a major war and fucked it up badly.
That shared consensus on history, and the stronger and more unified America that will result in the long run, is worth the additional costs of the surge in terms of lives and dollars, even if we fail to win in Iraq either way.
(And hey, who knows — it might just work.)
— Joe - Nov 28, 12:36 AM - #Great point Ben R. Civil disobedience is one thing, but violence is quite another and students should not be trying to take the route of the latter. They should be applauded for finding constructive and positive ways to bring about progressive change.
— Thomas Coen - Nov 28, 10:21 AM - #I’ve agreed with Martin’s writing in the past, however the article you speak of left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth. While I know that the “activists” Martin speaks of give the rest of us a bad name, there are plenty of us that worry more about how many soldiers have died in Iraq and not just what color ribbon would best represent that.
Thank you for your article.
— Lauren McDade - Nov 28, 09:56 PM - #To me it’s not even an issue of whether students are more or less active. Martin’s condescension is characteristic of a larger generation gap. Older generations operate under the assumption that if young people aren’t making noise then everything is fine simply because that is the way in which those kinds of conflicts have always been communicated in the past. That older people have such a hard recognizing the disconnect only indicates to me how large it really is.
— Christopher Patton - Nov 29, 08:01 PM - #Lest we forget, Students for a Democratic Society is back on the scene in a huge way. Coincidentally, their Northeast Convention is happening this weekend in Philly! www.newsds.org
— Liberaltarian - Nov 29, 08:11 PM - #Thank you!
— Sarah - Nov 30, 01:47 PM - #Joe — God help the students of a person who went into teaching because they prioritized vacation time. Wouldn’t you rather people thought about other things — like, say, their passions and skills — when choosing careers? And why should that decision determine how much vacation time they get?
— Eavan - Nov 30, 06:06 PM - #Youth of today activists? Get real. That 49 percent from 2004 will not be the number in 2008. Much lower.
Baby Boomers are in control now. And look who we have to choose from for President. Hillary Satan. Barack Obam. Rudy (debit card) Giulianni and Dr. Paul.
Good Grief. Might as well get a monkey to run for president. We already had three in the last 20 years.
— Bruce - Dec 4, 12:36 PM - #“Thanks to the work of our baby-boomer forebears, young people have a place in politics today. They work on political campaigns, in think tanks, and in government. They seek to expose problems and advocate for change through journalism and blogging. They even run for office.”
Therein lies the problem.
At least the “baby-boomer forebears” recognized that the system was the problem, not the answer. In the words of Mario Savio:
“There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part, you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop! And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!”
All this article proves is that “today’s youth activism” is, essentially, all about the machine.
— OilMonkey - Jan 12, 02:06 PM - #