Student Protesters Are Risking Arrest to Speak Out For Palestine. How Could We *Not* Feel Inspired?
By stacy lee kong
Image: Shutterstock
Content warning: this newsletter contains mentions of death, torture, racial violence and mass shootings. Links may contain graphic images.
A note on language: As I’ve mentioned in every newsletter I’ve written about Gaza since Oct. 7, it’s super important that we take care with our language when discussing Israel and Palestine, because the way we talk about this situation has real consequences for real people. So to be clear, when I critique the Israeli government and military, I am not critiquing all Israelis, much less all Jewish people. I also think it’s important to push back on attempts to characterize critique of Israel and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) as antisemitic. Furthermore, it is disingenuous and actually dangerous to conflate Zionism with Judaism, as this list of prominent Jewish writers has argued. Lastly, when I use the words colonization, genocide, apartheid, occupation and ethnic cleansing to describe Israel’s actions, that’s based on the analysis of organizations like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, the International Federation for Human Rights, the United Nations, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Jewish Voice for Peace as well as academics who study genocide and South Africa’s application to the International Court of Justice to bring genocide charges against Israel. It is also based on the language Israeli officials and public figures have used themselves, 500+ instances of which have already been collected by Law for Palestine.
I’ve spent a lot of time this week reading about the May 1970 Kent State massacre, when state National Guard troops opened fire on students holding an anti-war protest on the university’s Kent, Ohio campus, killing four people and injuring nine others. I had heard about it before—the 50th anniversary was in 2020, so there were a lot of retrospective pieces in various legacy publications at the time—but it has popped up again and again on my social feeds this week, as university students across America planned peaceful protests against Israel’s genocide in Palestine, as well as their schools’ financial investment in companies that do business with Israel, which they characterize as profiting from genocide, and therefore complicity in that genocide. And no wonder people keep bringing it up; the parallels are obvious, and it’s often super useful to look to the past for context about our present moment. But we should also consider what’s different now, especially when thinking about hope and optimism.
A history lesson
If you haven’t heard of the Kent State massacre, a recap: when Richard Nixon was elected U.S. President in 1968, it was, at least in part, based on his promise to end the Vietnam War. At first, it did seem like he was winding down America’s involvement in the conflict, but then on April 30, 1970, he announced he’d actually escalated it by invading Cambodia, because the Viet Cong had found sanctuary in Cambodian territory. Unsurprisingly, this was followed by an immediate wave of anti-war protests on American college campuses, including at Kent State. After a daytime rally on May 1, a Friday, Kent State students called for a second protest on Monday, May 4. That evening, what the university calls the “usual socializing in the bars” turned into violent clashes between police and protesters. In response, Kent’s then-mayor, Leroy Satrom, declared a state of emergency and asked Ohio Governor James Rhodes to dispatch the Ohio National Guard; soon, 1,000 troops were patrolling the campus.
By Monday, tensions had escalated dramatically. Just before the rally was due to start, National Guard general Robert Canterbury ordered students to disperse. When they didn’t, he ordered 100 of his troops to lock and load their weapons, M-1 military rifles, and fire tear gas into the crowds. In response, students yelled and threw rocks at the troops. After about 10 minutes, the soldiers appeared to be retreating, but then, 28 of the Guardsmen turned, knelt and pointed their weapons at the students. According to eyewitness accounts, protesters didn’t believe the soldiers would actually shoot, but they did; for 13 seconds, they opened fire on the crowd of students, killing four (19-year-old Allison Krause, 20-year-old Jeffrey Glenn Miller, 20-year-old Sandra Lee Scheuer, and 19-year-old William Knox Schroeder), permanently paralyzing one (Dean Kahler) and injuring eight others.
The impact of this act of political suppression and violence was profound; according to current Kent State professor Richard M. Perloff, who argued that it changed America forever in a 2020 New York Times article, “the ensuing political pressure propelled Nixon to end the unwarranted Cambodian invasion earlier than anticipated, on June 30, 1970. Second, the horror of students dying at the hands of a militaristic state helped propel Congress to pass the War Powers Act in 1973, which curbed the president’s war-making authority. Third, the protests contributed to the ratification of the 26th Amendment a year later, which lowered the voting age from 21 to 18.”
There were also less tangible effects, including the massacre’s influence on a new era of American history. Perloff cited David Greenberg, a Rutgers University professor of history and of journalism & media studies, who said the massacre “left a legacy of disillusionment. Generations like mine and those after mine grew up in the shadow of the 1960s. We grew up without great expectations that our leaders would act valiantly, without a naïve or simple view of the military, without confidence that protest could bring about political change.”
What’s more, Perloff argued, “Kent State also helped unearth a growing political polarization rooted in different views about the cultural changes wrought by the 1960s. The May 4 shootings were viewed very differently by conservatives and liberals; most conservatives endorsed the National Guard’s actions and at best wrote off the shooting as a tragic accident, at worst as the protesters’ just desert—a position that liberals and the left found unimaginable.”
Clearly, the American political class should not be underestimating the power of student protest
… which all sounds very familiar, no? Right now, university administrators at Columbia, Harvard, Yale, the University of Southern California and UT Austin, among others, are calling in cops in riot gear to assault and arrest students for peacefully protesting, as well as charging journalists with criminal trespassing for reporting on what’s going on. At some protests, there are snipers perched on rooftops, and some schools are even threatening to call in the National Guard, which feels particularly scary—and deliberately threatening—considering the legacy of Kent State. And the discourse online is similarly fractured, with conservatives implying, if not straight-up saying, that protesters are ‘pro-Hamas terrorists’ that require violent suppression, while liberals are horrified (and sometimes surprised, though they absolutely should not be) at these acts of state-sanctioned violence.
And there are other parallels, too. Two years before Kent State, there was another student protest that was violently quelled by police, but this one involved Black students protesting racism, and as such was largely ignored in mainstream media. It was February 1968, and a series of earlier protests against racial segregation at a local bowling alley culminated in a student protest on the Orangeburg, South Carolina campus of South Carolina State College. On the evening of February 8, students from the college, Claflin University, an HBCU also located in Orangeburg, and nearby Wilkinson High School, started a bonfire on the college campus. When police attempted to put it out, the students threw debris at them, injuring one officer. Within minutes, nine members of the state’s Highway Patrol and one of the city’s police officers opened fire on the students, killing three (Samuel Ephesians Hammond, Delano Herman Middleton, and Henry Ezekial Smith) and injuring 28 others. If some white Americans thought the Kent State massacre was justified, they barely noticed the Orangeburg massacre, which happened at a time when much of the American public had lost interest in the cause of racial segregation—all of which definitely gives me flashbacks to the intense interest in Black Lives Matter post-George Floyd’s murder, followed by widespread apathy just a few years later, as anti-Black racism was overshadowed by other, international crises.
Considering this context, the argument that Kent State did usher in at least some real social change and the fact that it’s just very inspiring to see young people risk arrest, expulsion and physical harm to stand up for their beliefs, it’s understandable that many people feel an anxiety-inducing mixture of fear and hope while watching these protests unfold. And I think that sense of hope is worth narrowing in on. I’ve had this conversation a few times recently, in addition to having written about it, so yes, I see all the reasons for nihilism, especially as the situation becomes ever more dire in Palestine, and the discourse more toxic in America and frankly, most Western nations. (Over the weekend, the bodies of 283 Palestinians were found in two mass graves at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, stripped naked with their hands tied, according to UN reports. And, 200 days into this conflict, the Palestinian death toll has officially surpassed 34,000, though this number does not include the tens of thousands of people who are believed to be buried in the rubble throughout Gaza. But there are still people in my DMs and comment section insisting that calling this a genocide is antisemitic. Also, discourse-wise, it’s downright frightening how quickly the U.S. government has moved to ban TikTok, the site of so many young people’s recent political awakenings, during an election year, on a pretty hypocritical premise.)
But seeing how quickly students across America have set up their own protest encampments inspired by their peers is a valid reason to feel hopeful; first, student protests have historically contributed to real change. According to Anti-Racism Daily, “three years before the Brown v. Board of Education decision desegregated American schools, Barbara Rose Jones and 450 classmates in an overcrowded, segregated Black school in Virginia walked out of class. The Little Rock Nine received national attention as the first Black students to attend an Arkansas school as the National Guard held off an angry white mob. High school and college students led the Freedom Rides to desegregate the South and formed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, one of the leading civil rights organizations. Sixteen-year-old Bobby Hutton was the first person to join the Black Panther Party and served as the Party’s treasurer until he was executed by Oakland police the following year. By 1969, Students for a Democratic Society had 100,000 members fighting the Vietnam War. Students launched campus occupations nationwide, demanding schools institute Ethnic Studies and end contracts with weapons corporations. [And] students forced U.S. universities to divest over $1 billion in investments from South Africa, contributing to the fall of the apartheid regime.”
Second, they spread. Consider a phenomenon called “mimetic isomorphism,” which yes, I learned about on TikTok. By definition, mimetic isomorphism “occurs when an organization copies the practices of another organization it perceives to be successful, particularly for problems ‘with ambiguous causes or unclear solutions.’” This can happen in any sector (which is why the source I’m citing for that definition is about standards of care in hospital settings), but it’s especially relevant here, because it’s not just post-secondary institutions that are copying each other—and problematically so. It’s also that students are copying each other, which is what makes a movement. The more young people who take up organizing, the harder it gets for the general public to look away, and I hope the clearer it becomes to elected officials that their actions are unpopular. Because if morals and ethics don’t matter, perhaps the risk of losing an election will? (I mean, probably not. But maybe.)
I’m just not sure we can extrapolate outcomes based on what has happened before
That being said, I do think we need to temper our hope with a sense of realism. It’s not really a surprise that universities are cracking down on anti-imperialist protest when they are literally invested in imperialism, via their “holdings in funds and businesses that activists say are profiting from Israel’s invasion of Gaza, and the longer-term occupation of Palestinian lands—including Google, which has a large contract with the Israeli government, and Airbnb, which allows listings in Israeli settlements on the occupied West Bank,” as the New York Times explained this week. At some schools, the connection is even more direct—while Yale announced in 2018 that it would no longer invest in companies that sell assault weapons to the general public via its then $27 billion endowment (which is now up to $40 billion), this week, the school refused to divest from military weapons manufacturers, which students say “make the bombs, planes, drones, and weapons used in Israel's assault on Gaza.”
And it’s definitely not a surprise that they’re cracking down on protest in this way, considering the ‘corporatization’ of American post-secondary institutions. This term refers to the way higher education has shifted away from public investment in education toward a model of revenue generation that depends largely on ‘smart’ business decisions, including offering more, and more expensive, professional programs like MBAs, accepting greater numbers of international students, increasing class sizes and exploiting a workforce increasingly made up of adjunct professors. (Also, there’s a Kent State connection here, too; author and Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch argues that after the rise of student protest in the ‘50s and ‘60s, conservatives wanted to curb protest, especially by the working-class students at state universities—and they really felt that way after Kent State, so they began raising tuition and pushing other policies that turned higher education from a public good to a capitalistic enterprise.) So, of course they’re responding to the existential threat these students represent as if it were the equivalent of a hostile takeover; in a sense, it is.
But this only proves how invested these schools—and so many Western institutions—are in upholding empire, and just how much change is actually required. And the thing about that is, student protests might be powerful, but they are not fast. They require sustained action, and are only part of a wider strategy.
If we think back to the legacy of Kent State, it’s clear that many of the shifts experts now attribute to the massacre, both tangible and intangible, took time to happen, and weren’t obvious until years, if not decades, later. It’s just easier to see cause and effect in retrospect, right? Still, I hope that we’ll see everything old is new again in that way, too.
Not Bad For Some Immigrants, Episode 3: Sometimes You Can Go Home Again
In the third episode of Friday Talks: Not Bad For Some Immigrants, I’m chatting with actor and musician Mark Clennon about the experience of being a Caribbean immigrant, people’s (often incorrect) impressions of our respective homelands—and especially the ways these places defy stereotypes. For Mark, that’s best exemplified by his experiences of returning to Jamaica in 2022 to film the music video for his song “Kingston,” which became the first music video featuring two male romantic leads filmed on the island, and led to real moments of affirmation and positivity. Watch now!
And Did You Hear About…
This deeply affecting essay by a 14-year-old Palestinian girl named Lujayn about what happened when the Israeli military bulldozed her home.
Writer Megan Nolan’s review of Baby Reindeer, the British miniseries everyone’s been talking about on my social feeds, which honestly is less of a review and more of a thoughtful meditation on the nature of abuse.
This super smart piece in The Atlantic about our current era of ‘consumer hostility.’
Vulture’s Q&A with Shōgun’s Hiroyuki Sanada about the behind-the-scenes work he did to ensure the show was historically and culturally accurate.
This thoughtful perspective on Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department, and the limits of the stories she keeps trying to tell. It’s far more sympathetic that I would be, but I think the writer makes some interesting points.
Bonus: Kid Vampire, a very silly series of TikToks that makes me laugh so, so hard.
Thank you for reading this week’s newsletter! Still looking for intersectional pop culture analysis? Here are a few ways to get more Friday:
💫 Join Club Friday, our membership program. Members get early access to Q&As with pop culture experts, Friday merch and deals and discounts from like-minded brands.
💫 Follow Friday on social media. We’re on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and even (occasionally) TikTok.
💫 If you’d like to make a one-time donation toward the cost of creating Friday Things, you can donate through Ko-Fi.