By Ellen Barry September 13. 2020. New York Times
Donald Harris and Shyamala Gopalan grew up under British colonial rule on different sides of the planet. They were each drawn to Berkeley, and became part of an intellectual circle that shaped the rest of their lives.
At an off-campus space at the University of California at Berkeley in the fall of 1962, a tall, thin Jamaican Ph.D. student
addressed a small crowd, drawing parallels between his native country and the United States.
He told the group, a roomful of Black students, that he had grown up observing British colonial power in Jamaica, the way a
small number of whites had cultivated a “native Black elite” in order to mask extreme social inequality.
Comments
A vivid account of the life of students of people of color at UC Berkeley in the late 50s and early 60s. At the time they were a tiny minority. Some 60 years later things have radically changed for the good!
I don’t think things have radically changed, but it has certainly changed quite a lot.
However, as a human society, there is tons to be done to ‘equalize‘ the world.