LIVING FOR CHANGE
A NEW GENERATION OF MOVEMENT BUILDERS
By Grace Lee Boggs
Michigan Citizen, June 3-9, 2007
Why aren’t young people willing to be involved in our struggles? This question kept coming up during my recent visit to New York. My hostess, Karen Taylor, raised it in relation to her sons, 18 and 24. At a gathering of about 25 veterans from the 60s so many people wanted to tackle the question that I suggested it be the only point on the agenda at a future meeting.
As Karen and I talked in her living room, it was easy for her, an artist, woman and mother, to realize that she couldn’t expect her sons to share her involvement in the struggle against racism because they have grown up in a world where you don’t have to risk your life to sit at the front of the bus. She could also understand how their ways of knowing and thinking can’t be the same as hers because they have been watching TV since they were toddlers and communicating and connecting through the Net since their early teens.
On the other hand, bloHoH ack male activists from the 60s seem to me to resist acknowledging this new epistemological reality. I think this is because so much of their identity was formed during the heady days of the black nationalist and black power movements. They also seem to me to be stuck in the language and ways of thinking of the 60s which revolved so much around denouncing the "isms” of racism, capitalism, colonialism and neo-colonialism
I am fortunate that in recent years I have been in continuing interaction with the members of the Detroit Summer Collective who are doing much of the organizing for the ninth annual Allied Media Conference convening at Wayne State University in Detroit over the weekend of June 22-24.
The theme of this year’s conference is “Breaking Silence, Building Movements.”
The Allied Media Conferences have been initiated by a new generation of activists who on the basis of their own experience believe that the media can be used to build a movement among the most vulnerable members of our society. Film, radio, hip hop and other arts, they believe, can build on the inherent knowledge of grassroots individuals and communities to develop their curiosity and critical thinking skills so that they can discover the root causes of their problems and generate their own solutions.
On Friday morning, June 22, I will open an all day Symposium bringing together youth, educators, artists, and organizers to share ideas on how media arts can transform education and vice versa. I especially urge educators, parents and community leaders seeking solutions to our deepening schools crisis to participate in this Symposium. State Board Continuing Education Units (SB-CEUs) will be offered to participating Michigan teachers.
Conference workshops and discussions will include:
Email Grace Boggs Center,