What Student Protests Tell Us About America Under Trump
While it may be President Obama’s job to ease the country through the change in leadership to a President Donald Trump administration, the rest of the country doesn’t have to go along with it. At least, that’s the message coming from a massive show of protest and resistance in cities and towns across the nation.
An outpouring of opposition coming from students in k-12 public schools and college campuses is especially significant.
Why? Public schools have long been at the frontline of many of the nation’s most significant battles.
Much for the class conflict that ignited during the Great Depression and spawned the New Deal was foretold by the challenges schools faced in educating the massive influx of poor, uneducated immigrant children into the country in the early decades of the 20th century.
In the 1950s and 60s, school desegregation was an epicenter in the Civil Rights Movement that produced landmark Supreme Court decisions such as Brown v Board of Education and Schwann v Charlotte-Mecklenberg.
Today, pubic schools – where non-white students outnumber their white peers and a majority live in poverty – are the nascent sign of the increasing diversity and inequality in the country. It’s no coincidence that the current Supreme Court case considering the rights of transgender individuals in public places arose from an incident in a public school.
So public schools, as long as they stay truly public, are often the first institutions to reflect society’s most important social trends. In this new era under a Trump regime, student protests are telling us something is very wrong.
What Students Are Saying
Student protests exploded as the reality of the election outcome sunk in the morning of November 9.
As The Intercept reports, that day, high school walkouts occurred across the country, with students leaving their classrooms en masse in Phoenix, Boulder, Seattle, and Des Moines, In one school in the Bay Area of Northern California, 1,500 students – half the school – took to the street to express their dissatisfaction with the election results.
“They’re angry … They’re crying and they feel unsafe,” explains the principal of that school to a local news reporter. Protests also occurred in Oakland, Contra Costa County, and San Jose.
As Education Week reports, student protests continued in many places through the rest of the week, from Omaha to Los Angeles where students in 16 schools walked out.
In Omaha, students chanted, “Not my President,” according to a local news source. “Most of us are 15, 16, 17 years old,” said one student. “We feel like we don’t have a say … By doing this, students have a voice.”
College students have joined in the protests as well with huge rallies in Austin, Texas, the University of Connecticut, and American University in Washington, DC, according to Politico.
In Nashville, Tennessee, Vanderbilt students staged a “Protest Against Hate” and walked out of class on Friday, a local news outlet reports. “Since the election, I think people have thought that they can come out of their shells and be blatant with their racism,” one of the protestors is What Student Protests Tell Us About America Under Trump:
