A Message to Black Millennials: #iProtest Isn’t Enough

I’m going to start this post with a little bit of honesty: until recently, I thought that organizations like the NAACP and the National Urban League and some of the other old Civil Rights infrastructure were outdated, irrelevant, and unhelpful in the conversation about race in America. I thought that the idea of sit-ins and protests were good tools for another time, that peace marches and locking arms were something for a time gone by. Quite frankly, I had an attitude of “what have ya’ll done for me lately?”

I never thought that these organizations should disappear… I considered them to be Professors Emeritus in the sphere of race and class conversations in this nation. We see them as an authority, representations of the “old school,” but I thought that it was time for a new vocabulary, because we live in a new world with new needs.

And then Trayvon…