In 1985, when American campuses were roiling with protests against apartheid South Africa, the legendary African-American feminist poet and philosopher, Audre Lorde, reflected that America was “the most powerful country in the world” but also “a country which stands upon the wrong side of every liberation struggle on earth”. Lorde noted that this filled her with both a sense of dread and a sense of urgency. Dread and urgency, once again, have driven students across campuses in the United States to protest against the catastrophe in Gaza. During the anti-apartheid protests calling for divestment at campuses in the late-1980s — when we ourselves were students — university administrators were embarrassed about aligning with the White apartheid state of South Africa. Today, with Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism so normalised in the U.S., university administrators are proudly aligning with this genocidal war. Armed police guard our libraries, check-points have been placed across our campus and we are learning that a police siege of our campuses is the new normal in the modern U.S. university.
Students are educating each other
Across the country, student protesters have a unified set of demands: Disclosure and divestment in corporations complicit in weapons manufacturing and the Israeli occupation of Palestine; “Cops off Campus”; and protecting pro-Palestinian speech and activism across the university. The call for divestment can be traced to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement beginning in 2008 that was inspired by the anti-racist, anti-apartheid student movement that Audre Lorde was addressing. The call for “cops off campus” can be explained by the abolitionist critiques of the police as a racist institution amplified in the wake of the George Floyd protests of 2020, along with the fact that this generation in universities today were mobilised into activism against the gun violence that has plagued them in schools since childhood. Finally, the call for the protection of pro-Palestine speech and activism is a reflection of the history of university administrators’ complicity in the “Palestine exception” to academic freedom made especially evident since October 2023.
