Rinku Sen is the President and Executive Director of the Applied Research Center (ARC) and Publisher of Colorlines.com. She
writes:
This week, Colorlines.com’s publisher, the Applied Research Center, released Millennials, Activism and Race, a report on the motivations of young people who are active in progressive politics. Following up on last year’s research, Don’t Call Them Post-Racial, this report gives us more information about what draws 18 to 30 year olds to social justice work, and how people with progressive politics deal with race as part of a larger political worldview. [...]
Rinku Sen
The findings are based on nine focus groups held in five cities (Atlanta, Baltimore, New York, Oakland, Portland) in 2011 and 2012, with participants who either worked/volunteered for a progressive organization or participated in the Occupy movement. The goal of the research was to better understand the attitudes and motivations of millennials who are actively engaged in social justice—why they engage, what they see as barriers to an ideal society and opinions on whether an explicit racial justice lens is essential. [Some highlights]:
• Politically active, young progressives most often find themselves in the work as a result of family influences. They aren’t having grand epiphanies at lectures by prominent people or even recruited heavily by their friends. Their understanding and commitments come from observing or experiencing daily struggle.
• People active in Occupy and those active in community organizations are similarly disenchanted with the electoral system. Their frustration was less about the Obama administration than it was about the dysfunctionality of the electoral and legislative systems generally.
• All our participants named a dominant doctrine of individualism as a critical barrier to progressive change, but people involved with Occupy had a more explicit critique of capitalism as a system than those involved in other organizations.
• Most respondents felt the need to address the racial dimensions of inequality, but they both wanted to include other systems in that analysis, and had few tools with which to bring in race with any combination of other systems like class, gender and sexuality.
Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2006:
Pardon my cynicism for a moment. But in the wake of the raid on Congressman Jefferson's office, all the flutter in the legislative and executive branches about concepts like the "separation of powers" and "constitutionally protected areas" has a tangibly synthetic feel to it, does it not?
So Dennis "Don't Tell Anyone I'm Under Investigation" Hastert suddenly dusted off his copy of the Constitution. And Bill "Ongoing SEC Investigation" Frist wants procedures in place to know "exactly what will happen if there is a similar sort of thing." Of course he does.
And James Sensenbrenner, who didn't move an inch of his miserable body when the President chose to ignore 750 laws passed by Congress, has now scrambled to arrange a hearing next week titled, "Reckless Justice: Did the Saturday Night Raid of Congress Trample the Constitution?" So Sensenbrenner finally woke up to a constitutional crisis...after six years. What, did his Ambien finally wear off?
Tweet of the Day:
The 1% fears that government has too much control over corporations. The 99% knows that corporations have too much control over government.
— @AMSPRINGDOTORG via web
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