Why do institutions that enabled structural inequality under slavery, apartheid or Jim Crow remain unchanged after such systems become illegal? How can we expect to eradicate structural inequality when oppressive structures remain firmly intact?
Why don’t we judge learners not by the tests they were set up to fail, nor the university attainment they were intended never to achieve, but by something else?
My first two weeks in Cape Town have presented me with a series of messy tensions that I’ll have to navigate over the next few weeks and months.
Recognizing that not everyone has agreed with me or liked me during this time, I will say that getting people to do so is no longer a goal of mine. What I hope I’ve done over the past 10 weeks is to get people to think critically about some of the following questions:
At stake in the multibillion-dollar American-Israeli occupation of Palestine are contemporary issues that I and many other Stanford students care about, including the increase of racial profiling, police brutality against nonviolent political dissidents, American immigration policy and the welfare of the global poor.
Stanford University, the American media and the United States government are all complicit in the atrocities that have developed in the Gaza Strip over the past few days.
Barack Obama’s reelection is not a political end – nor does it guarantee the beginning of a future that values human rights and social justice.
That Obama has such intelligence, eloquence and charm makes his actions even worse.