I was sitting in my Poli-Sci/CNAS class last Thursday, at 3:45, towards the end of a group of students' presentation, wondering why we had decided to leave early. It's an easy situation to misjudge. You'd think 20 some-odd students would be clamoring to get out of class early towards the end of the week, especially around midterms, especially when we've still got over 50 pages due this semester. You'd probably realize it made a whole lot of sense to leave early that day—the International Roundtable was starting. But you'd be surprised to find out that some of us were a little sorry to leave.
Last Thursday, our assignment was to give group presentations on the global philosophical influences on the Black Panther Party. Easier said than done. We were talking about the histories of classical Marxism, Frantz Fanon's theories of race and the Algerian anti-colonial war, the Maoist Cultural Revolution, and the Cuban Revolution. Before anyone calls John Ashcroft, remember, we're critical thinkers. Our responsibility was to tell our classmates what these movements were about, not pick one and start marching. We only got through two of them. At 3:45, we had basically figured out that the BPP was a lot like Macalester: you know, internationalism, multiculturalism, and watch out for that civic engagement. Internationalism looks very different, however, through the lens of a Comparative North American Studies class; some people don't even think that's the place to bring it up. But with all the talk about how academic excellence is
the well from which all of Macalester's core values spring, it's interesting to note that we were so intellectually engaged in this class on a bunch of hippie communes and armed colored people that we almost missed out on Prometheus' Bequest. Who's missing out in this situation.
At the end of the class, when we had decided to put off the last two groups until next week, and then move on to some other revolutionary ethno-nationalist movements (it's Comparative), I made a comment. I wanted to point out that we had been talking about internationalism in a class that fulfills the domestic diversity requirement. And we had been talking about it hard. We had been talking about the first armed revolutionary movement on the United States since the Civil War, a socialist movement that mobilized a whole host of very serious, violent, and radical forces in American politics, some of which are still with us today in subtler forms. And we had been talking about it all in terms of people of color. Our professor asked, not in so many words: so you're cheerleading for multiculturalism?
No. I was cheerleading for internationalism.
Then we went to the Roundtable.
