News & Events
Black Solidarity Day Speaker at City Tech Forecasts Change in U.S. Political Mindset
Photo Credit: Dr. Horace G. Campbell, Syracuse University
Guest speaker Horace G. Campbell didn’t mince his words in assuring a capacity audience at New York City College of Technology’s (City Tech) recent Black Solidarity Day observance that both Obama’s “Audacity of Hope” campaign and expected Election Day victory signaled a fundamental change in the American political mindset and framework.
The Obama victory, said Campbell, Syracuse University Professor of African American Studies and Political Science, would result from a “bottom-up movement” that had seen record numbers of American youth engage in the political process amid an unprecedented rise in public opinion that the nation is on the wrong track and in deep trouble at home and abroad. People of all persuasions desire change, he added, and the Obama campaign theme responded to that longing for a new American political paradigm based on “truth, justice, peace and a different mode of politics.”
Campbell’s City Tech remarks drew heavily on an article, “Obama at the crossroads of a revolution?” he had written earlier. In both the article and his talk, he argued that an Obama presidency “would only be trapped by a conservative and anti-people social and economic system,” if those attracted to candidate Obama’s “Audacity of Hope” campaign failed to “organize to build their own political movement.” Those who would enable an Obama victory, he added, must not allow the country to fall back into the “binary categories that perpetuate divisions and the politics of exclusion.”
Campbell does not view Obama as “a revolutionary,” but rather as an individual “caught in a revolutionary moment” whose “message of hope has tapped into the desire for peace, reconstruction and justice.” In 2008, Campbell maintains, an army of youth that grew up in the era of the information revolution used “new social networking techniques that baffle the political pundits reared in the universities that taught the physics of Isaac Newton and the derivative mechanical concepts of Adam Smith and John Locke.” The young employed these techniques in a way that hopefully will help create a society “freed from the old politics of division and fear” – that is, from the “real America/other America” dichotomy employed this year by some old school politicians.
Obama recognizes the power, Campbell adds, inherent in the emerging use of such new techniques. “The idea of change that echoes from the Obama campaign” calls “for citizens to place themselves at the center and to empower themselves, firstly with their positive thinking, ‘Yes we can,’ and more importantly by organizing to intervene in the political process.” Campbell believes that “the political pundits of the mainstream media brought up within the context of Newtonian physics have been confounded by the bottom-up, responsive, pluralistic and holistic message of the ‘Yes we can’ campaign.”
According to City Tech African American Studies Professor Tshombe Walker, who moderated a panel discussion titled “Challenges of the 2008 Election” preceding Campbell’s talk, “This year’s election marked a watershed event in American history – an event through which the American people demanded fundamental changes in the way government does business. While voting is the necessary first step in the direction of political and economic change, the American people themselves must become agents of the change they seek through active involvement in the critical issues of the day and organized support for their elected officials.”
Other panel members included Law & Paralegal Studies Professor Angela M. Redman and Social Sciences Professors Peter Parides and Simboonath Singh. Before the group discussion, African American Studies Professor Stephen James spoke about the origins of Black Solidarity Day. It was in 1968 that a small group of Blacks decided to designate a date rather than create another organization that would move Blacks nationwide to realize that the success of their struggle, both as individuals and collectively, depended on unity.
Additional speakers at the Atrium Amphitheater event included City Tech President Russell K. Hotzler, Provost Bonne August, Dean of Arts & Sciences Pamela Brown, Coalition of Black Faculty & Staff Chair Professor Mary Alice Browne, Black Student Union President Travis Alvarez, Student Government Association President Lerone Blasdille and Black Male Initiative Director Professor Reginald Blake.
As part of City Tech’s Black Solidarity Day observance, student members of the African American Theatre course performed a scene from the Douglas Turner Ward play Day of Absence. The play is set in a small town in the Deep South, where two characters are talking one day when they suddenly realize that none of the town’s Blacks have been seen since the previous evening. When this fact becomes general knowledge, the sleepy town is suddenly brought to the brink of chaos. Without its black labor force, it is paralyzed because of its dependence on this sector of the community. The student cast included Tamara Shand, Ashley Guillaum, Tamara Mosley, Scherie Murray and Chioma Okoye.
11/26/08
