The Prog

Below is a letter written by the Black Justice League at Princeton to the Black students at the University of Missouri To the Black Students…

Members of student activist groups--some that formed this year, others that existed for years be- fore--describe the ways in which they have challenged existing discourses and policies this year. Their methods are as disparate as their concerns, but taken together they represent a rediscovered conception of how to be a socially conscious and politically active Princetonian.

Seven months later, after the People’s Climate March and #blacklivesmatter march, after the die-in and divestment, we can begin to speak about a campus where apathy is giving way to awareness. Awareness is not yet action, but it is a start. The gravest mistake that we could make now would be to content ourselves with the progress that has been made--to pat each other on the back and walk off the field.

Inequality is no longer off-limits within academic economics, and economists are now willing to tackle the questions about inequality that may prove to be important to more progressive agendas.

In its embodiment of the experience of the radicalized academic-turned-policymaker, Yanis’s career exemplifies the ideal path through which young, aspiring American and European intellectuals of the left can gain real political authority: by leveraging scholarly successes in some policy-relevant field in order to ascend to positions of direct political power.

Culture and discourse can be useful fronts in political battle, but without a theory of change that includes how to take power, or at least make significant and binding demands of it, what happens on the cultural and discursive fronts guarantees nothing.

When citizens are inactive, there are few, if any checks on the powers that be and the few, the elites, the one percent can take even greater control. Democratic resignation is the foundation of oligarchy.

Princeton pursues many sustainable on-campus policies, but if it wants to invest in a sustainable future it should focus on its endowment as well as its campus. It is time to start attacking the threat of climate change from every possible angle, including through our investments.

If anything, isolating prisons and executions from society has opened up a fertile imaginative space in which the anxieties and curiosities of the free citizenry can manifest. Rather than facilitating real empathy for the plight of the incarcerated, popular culture has appropriated the high stakes of trial and punishment for the sake of ratings and publicity.