Throughout the months of May and June, students across the United States have been taking stands, turning their backs, and loudly protesting the racist commencement speakers their colleges and universities have invited to send them off into the “real world.”
Colleges: Ruling-Class Institutions
Established just less than 400 years ago, the U.S. university system has been a breeding ground for imperialist leaders, think tanks, and providing funding for mass murders around the world.
As a microcosm of the state, college campuses exist to develop the ruling-class thought leaders while also giving liberal-leaning students enough leeway to buy into the façade of activism and first amendment “rights.” College campus sit-ins, peaceful protests, and study groups have often been bolstered by institutions, teachers and administrations until they grew organized, militant, and—most threatening—integrated.
A Contradiction for the Bosses
The bosses, and the institutions they rely on to maintain state power, need racism to keep workers divided. This year, U.S. bosses are in one of their greatest binds in recent years. With the undisciplined, racist, sexist, and fascist Donald Trump at the supposed helm of the country, the main wing of the ruling-class is struggling to maintain order, while also encouraging their biggest resource for ideological control and profit.
College students and workers have historically played a central role in anti-racist movements (see spread above).  The Civil Rights movement, protest against Vietnam, Cambodia, and Apartheid in South Africa and Israel were led by integrated student groups.
This year, however, students are under attack for even the most peaceful of protests. Major media outlets, another arm of the capitalist system, ganged up on students for boldly disrupting racist commencement speakers. Meanwhile, new laws in Illinois, Tennessee, Colorado and Arizona are also in consideration in an effort to prevent institutions and students from dis-inviting speakers and force administrations to penalize students who obstruct and protest. (USA Today, 5/10)
Students at Bethune-Cookman Univeristy, a Historically Black College and University (HBCU) in Florida, stood up, turned their backs on, and booed their commencement speaker—Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, who was invited to speak after Trump promised funding for HBCUs. Racist DeVos called HBCU’s “pioneers when it comes to school choice,” when in reality, such colleges were the only option for Black workers during de jure segregation. The college’s president publicly chastised this group of all Black students; later on, the bosses’ media attacked them with numerous headlines.
“Some students stood up and turned their back, and the booing was so loud at different points in the speech that the school’s president stood up, interrupted DeVos, took the microphone, and said to the students, “If this behavior continues, your degrees will be mailed to you. Choose which way you want to go.” (The Washington Post, 5/12)
At Yale thousands of graduate students and workers marched toward the commencement ceremony last month to demand the school begin negotiations with a union that was formed by students after the National Labor Relations Board lifted a ban on organizing teachers’ assistants and researchers at private universities. (CHALLENGE, 6/14)
And perhaps the most outrageous attack in recent months was towards the group of integrated students at Middlebury College who shut down a speech by the racist and sexist eugenicist Charles Murray. (CHALLENGE, 4/19) The students have since been charged with serious penalties and been labeled “violent” and “unruly” for protesting the leading voice in eugenics.
Racist teachers and administrators are disguising their racism as pro-free speech. “In this country, threat kind of speech is legal. We have no hate speech exception in the first amendment. Even stopping the most virulent Nazi on campus isn’t free speech; it is civil disobedience,” said James Weinstein, professor of constitutional law at Arizona State University (USA Today, 5/13).
 However, students at Notre Dame, a private and predominately white university, have only gotten praise for walking out on Vice President Mike Pence, who was invited to speak at the commencement in lieu of Trump. “School officials knew of the student walkout plans and did not try to stop them. The students – more than 100 out of a few thousand who were earning degrees – walked quietly out, and there were some cheers and boos sounded, through only briefly“ (The Washington Post, 5/21).
Students have historically been given space to explore varying political ideologies and practices at college but within limits controllable by the ruling-class. The bosses play a balancing game between their need for a vibrant movement that keeps the farce of democracy and patriotism alive and their need to control and funnel the movement for their war aims.
Multiracial student movements, a threat to the bosses, are quickly shutdown by any means necessary.  New York Times columnist Frank Bruni exposes himself for the ruling-class mouthpiece he is when he instructs working-class and multiracial students to not “bite the hand that feeds them:”
“They ratchet up their language to a degree that weakens its currency for direr circumstances. And they undermine their goals—our goals—by pushing away good-hearted allies and handling ammunition to the very people who itch to dismiss them” (NYT, 6/3).
Pledge to Continue to Fight
CHALLENGE says hats off to all graduates and students who organized against racist speakers! As young and future workers at colleges across the country continue to expose these institutions as racist-for-profit breeding grounds, the need for political leadership and guidance is greater than ever. Commencement speech protests  may be the first fightback as students join workforces that are equally as racist, sexist, and segregated.
Graduates, the struggle for a better world continues and the working-class needs you to pledge allegiance to a lifetime of antiracism. Only a multiracial international movement for communism can abolish this segregated society once and for all.