At 4:45 am on May 8, the University of Chicago Police Department arrived at the UChicago Popular University of Gaza, a Gaza solidarity encampment organized by a coalition of student organizations called UChicago United for Palestine, and destroyed it. Within 15 minutes, the most beautiful, abundant, diverse iteration of university life many of us had ever experienced was gone. All the participants in the encampment — including me, an assistant professor — were left to wonder, did we win? By now, many of the almost 200 encampments that sprung up across the country have been raided and destroyed by police.
How do we make sense of the legacy of the encampments? This question is fundamentally about how we process the rise and fall of revolutionary moments within reactionary times. First, we must celebrate the triumph of revolutionary thinking and practice — even when its material manifestations are brief. The encampments already won something simply by existing.
Liberal and centrist forces within U.S. politics are always working to co-opt and defang social movements in the United States by pushing them into silos of reformist single-issue campaigns.
Too much of the energy of the movement for gay liberation got poured into the campaign for gay marriage for this reason. And too much of the energy associated with the movement for women’s liberation got poured into distilled milquetoast logics of white, middle-class feminism. Everywhere, movements of power and liberation have.