The Wake

The other day I sat outside Coffman, soaking up the remnants of summer sun, watching students pay more attention to those pink, corporate-leashed dogs left around campus by corporate marketing mavens (it’s no “Secret”), than to the people who care enough to register new voters. They hurried by them, avoiding eye contact at all costs. Instead, they chase pink envy, beg for freebie, thong-sized dreams and care only about self.

We lock our doors and feel safe locked inside gates. We act afraid to look the next man in the eye. We connect only through battery power –- cell phones, sidekicks, two-ways, text messages– our instant tracking devices (though it doesn’t matter because we aren’t really doing anything anyway). It’s sad really. We walk around believing that we are “free”, that there really is “free market” and that we are individuals with “free will”, but all we are really free to do is think inside the box, color inside the lines, follow the rules and be good consumers.

“Why do you come to college?” I ask my students. “To get a good job,” they all say. “What’s a good job?” I ask in return. “One that pays a lot of money!” they shout in unison. “Did anyone come to college to learn something?” They laugh. I’ve never been more serious.

This year is the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka and the 40th anniversary of the “Freedom Summer” (voter registration campaign in the South). Both are significant historical moments my students don’t remember. “Umm, I think I heard of that before,” they say.

“These struggles were waged by students, teachers and antiracist communities,” said Angela Davis, legendary scholar, activist and writer, to a standing-room-only audience in downtown Minneapolis last week, “organizations like SNCC, The Black Panther Party, The Brown Berets, The Young Lords [and many others] led these movements [because they felt] a profound dissatisfaction with the world as it was then.” Students in this country have fueled much of the social change and movements for justice, but I wonder why so little is happening now. “I want us to think about how we can contribute to change,” says Davis. So do I.

Today our schools feel more like prisons with metal detectors and police on guard, and we are tracked to go to college or to prison. Our government plans for us to go to prison. They rapidly build more prisons while simultaneously cutting educational funding. But this week 396,000 of us were more captivated by Nelly’s nursery-rhyme raps, buying both “Sweat” and “Suit”, and not caring about much more.

As you sit in class flipping through this paper, all I ask is that you think. Yes, THINK. Why do you sit in that seat? Realize that generations before you shed blood, literally, so you can sit in the seat. Will you sit there just transcribing lectures, regurgitating facts back, shading in scantron squares with your No. 2 pencil, so you can be a good worker – one who follows the rules and colors gray neatly inside the box?

I challenge you - color outside the box, scratch your pencil far beyond the page, think about what you would shed your own blood for? Then for that, please, stand up.

Rachel Raimist is a Feminist Studies PhD student in the Department of Women’s Studies, a filmmaker, photographer, activist, and writer. Engage her at raim0007@umn.edu.