There is a way that white liberals glorify the student uprisings of 1968. I’m familiar with this through friends who say things like, “I wish I’d been there.” I’ve also learned about this valorization through my field (sociology), and the subgenre that focuses on social movements, which could be renamed, “We Wish We’d Been There,” or, for the more senior scholars in the field, “I Was There and I Made a Career of It.” All research is me-search, as the saying goes.
![from: https://www.cbglcollab.org/1968-in-europe-youth-movements-protests-and-activism from: https://www.cbglcollab.org/1968-in-europe-youth-movements-protests-and-activism](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fba768f44-556d-453d-878c-d355011edfb0_1878x1022.png)
I’m also hearing a kind of weary sadness from those around me, that 1968 was the real student uprising, the template for understanding what’s happening today. I guess the lionizing of 1968 makes sense in some ways. Certainly here in New York, the students at City College (of CUNY) are explicitly calling on that history when they issue “Five Demands,” about divestment echoing the earlier student-led movement. Across town at Columbia University, there’s a similar call-and-response between 1968 and the present.
![from: https://wagingnonviolence.org/2024/05/columbia-protests-students-1968/ from: https://wagingnonviolence.org/2024/05/columbia-protests-students-1968/](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7a8f84e6-23ea-4aa5-9b34-b3abefef9e12_1362x884.png)
So, when I attended a fundraising gala for the Institute for Middle East Understanding recently and had the great fortune of being seated next to Laura Whitehorn, I asked her about it. In case you’re not familiar, Whitehorn was part of the Weather Underground and spent decades in prison for her activism. She now works with the collective RAPP Campaign (Releasing Aging People in Prison). We’d met before at some other activist-type event and have several friends in common, so I felt more emboldened than socially awkward (my default at big events like the one we were attending). At some point in the midst of crying into my entrée over the images of murdered Palestinians, I asked Laura: Lots of people are comparing what’s happening now to the uprising in 1968. I was only 7 then, but you were a fully grown adult who was involved, what do you think? She replied without hesitation:
“Oh, this movement, today is so much better than ours. First of all, it’s so much more international. There were very few Vietnamese people in our anti-war movement. And, the movement today is so much more diverse in ways that matter. These young people are also much better at collective care than we were.”
I’ve been repeating this story over and over to friends so often that my partner finally said, “that should get out to a wider world.” Hence, this post. I followed up with Laura to make sure I had her permission to repeat our dinner conversation and she agreed, adding this:
“There have been lots of lessons learned since then: the need to build solidarity based on respecting and supporting the right of self determination—of Vietnam in the earlier period and of the Palestinian people now, including their right to resist and fight as they determine.”
Her words have given me so much hope these past few weeks, so I’m passing them along to you now. And, if you can spare a few coins, please donate to IMEU and to the RAPP Campaign. Thanks, Laura!