By Starr Lewis ’18
“Oh, say, can you see, by the dawn’s early light,
What so proudly we hail’d at the twilight’s last gleaming?
Whose broad stripes and bright stars, thro’ the perilous fight,
O’er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming?
Students are kneeling.
Student activism is a real thing and even more so a major factor in social movements. Everyday, there is a topic to be discussed and even more problems to be solved. I believe that student activism has the most impactful changes on society.
More recently, there’s been a social ripple effect of Colin Kaepernick’s involvement in the Black Lives Matter movement. More specifically, he is the center of attention because he kneeled during the national anthem at the preseason football game for the San Francisco 49ers. Since then, he has been contributed greatly to the mass spread of protest in the NFL.
Essentially what does this have to do with you, being a high school student, and even more maybe an athlete? High school students have begun to take part in this social movement as well. At Aurora Central High School in Colorado, student athletes, during their football games, began to take a knee during the national anthem, following in Colin Kaepernick’s footsteps. Student influence is not out of style, and in this time, it’s definitely most prevalent as social movements are becoming the center to revolution such as Black Lives Matter. Student activism in general has brought up an abundant amount of attention in social media specifically. There have been over 100 accounts of student activism across the United States, and even more relatably one right here close to home, Pritzker College Prep.
At our homecoming game, Oct. 7, three of Pritzker’s very own students took a knee during the national anthem and the opposing team, Johnson College Prep, participating in this movement. Johnson’s side held their fists as they held onto their helmets in the air. Even somewhere so close to home has been influenced by Colin Kaepernick’s protest.
Student activism is significant in a way that any form of rebellion can be since students hold the best representation of how our future will look because we have the stage next. The world is a vast canvas, but we make up all the curves and dents in order to fill them with our power as students and the youth.
We students have the ultimate potential to promote any social movement. Promotion may require at least one person to speak up but it requires all of us to .