The Global Face of Student Protest - The New York Times: "In America, we’ve been focused on the first word in the phrase “safe space.” We should be focused on the second. These student protests are about space and who wields power within it.
They’re a subset of a bigger range of protests now erupting all over the world. In the Netherlands, protesters have demonstrated against Zwarte Piet, the blackface jester who’s a feature of the country’s Christmas parades. Zwarte Piet’s defenders argue that the figure’s origins were not racist. The protesters’ rejoinder has been: Who are you to decide? In Australia, people in Melbourne demonstrated against racially discriminatory random visa checks. In Brazil, a new civil rights movement has emerged to give land to descendants of former slaves. The students who object to Princeton’s buildings named for Wilson represent merely a corner of a second, global anti-racism movement, one probably still in its infancy. This movement takes on not who has the right to have access to our public squares, as the first civil rights movements did, but who owns them."
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