“What is your position in times of challenge & controversy?” and after Jack Ruby’s .38 Colt Cobra 

“Diversity”:  The Young people claps back

Because the revolution WILL be televised — our storm is stirring, the kettle is steaming, and murmurs in hallways about the latest “incident” following, angry Facebook posts calling out all the scaredy racist hoes, too many fights about affirmative action, quickly become organizing meetings in basements, protests in the streets demands are made and students are angry until we forget, we grow tired, the angry ones get caught up with papers to write and orgo labs to administer and applications to compete and exams to take and places abroad to study and meetings, the angry ones graduate, get weeded out of the four years, but then the right time comes, with the right class with just the right racist events happen for the race wars to reignite, freshmen come with matches, expecting better futures, opportunities, hopes for better days, ignited by sly comments from peers and discouraging professors, beginning their radical awakenings unlike all these tired-worn-out-jaded upperclassmen already learned and burnt out, these freshmen come full rampage knowing and reminding all of us that liberation has yet to be achieved, we are still oppressed; whether it be in the classroom or on the streets, we are still oppressed, and the movement never ended until the day we achieve liberation, it never will, but it didn’t start with us, it started with the Intercultural movement in 2012, the fight for a physical space for marginalized, oppressed students to be, to just be, isn’t that something, that a literal space had to be fought for for people to just be, in a place that was not made for them in the creation of the institution, let alone thought about them in their big recruitment of “diversity”, from the exotic worlds — the inner cities, the third world, but it started even before that, with Black students in the 50’s, when they met with a civil rights activist that visited campus to create a Black Student Organization, with demands, with protests, fighting against minstrel shows and lack of resources for Black students and for a physical space, and for me, oppression is not felt separately and neither will liberation, for me to be a radical is to understand that my oppression as a Vietnamese-American-Queer-Womxn is entangled with Black folks, Trans folks, disabled folks, working-class folks, undocumented folks, white women, that our liberation will be intertwined, and that it even started with “yellow peril supports Black power”, with Asian Americans supporting “Free Huey”, with Yuri Kochiyama and Malcolm X, with Brown Berets and Black Panthers, with Puerto Ricans and Black folks, with Third world coalition, with the elders and youth — and as Huey says, The revolution has always been in the hands of the young. The young always inherit the revolution — how will our revolutions achieve liberation?