“One year later, where are Yale’s activists?” begins one YDN column from 2001. Just one year prior, the university’s students had united en masse in the name of workers’ rights and demanding that Yale stop its use of sweatshop labor in the U.S. and abroad. Indeed, as the article notes, Yale’s campus was “afire with activism”. Though the article seems to bemoan the loss of many of these activists to other movements, the author neglects to consider the intertwining of systems of oppression, among which whiteness, patriarchy, and capitalism stand at the forefront.
The activism of the 2000’s challenged such interlocking systems in highly varied manners. We invite the exhibit goer to reconsider forms of activism, beyond the go-to ideas of protest or hunger strike, and consider spaces of art, daily discussions, and the claim of a right to belong to a space as forms of resistance. This is exemplified in “InSight”, a work by Yale undergrad Michelle Wong ‘08 that challenges the gendered racialization of Asian women as weak or feeble. The 35th anniversary celebration of the Afro-American Cultural Center asserts the right of black students to belong at Yale while simultaneously celebrating the history of activism that gave birth to The House and more generally that of Afro-American students at Yale.
At the forefront of activism in the 2000’s however, remain challenges to involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, the growth of the security state, and affirmative action, an issue we see revived in our present moment. Yale Law students, wearing camouflage gags, marched through campus, protesting the exclusion of LGBTQ+ residents from military service, for instance. Activism finds itself manifest in innumerable ways, and we further invite the exhibit goer to consider the impact that their actions can have on systems of oppression.