UPDATED: April 8, 2016 at 4:42 p.m.

NAACP President and CEO Cornell Brooks thinks that over and over again, humans are being reduced to hashtags.

Brooks spoke at Syracuse University’s annual Black Convocation: State of the Black Youth on Wednesday in the Joyce Hergenhan Auditorium in the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. The event was co-sponsored by SU’s chapters of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ).

The purpose of the Black Convocation, NABJ President Cherokee Hubbert said, “is to formally unite us to discuss the state of our union, more specifically, today, our youth.”

Brooks’ lecture centered largely around social justice and racial issues in the United States, and how young people can help the country make progress on those issues.

Jakia Warren, the juvenile justice chair of SU’s chapter of the NAACP, introduced Brooks as the keynote speaker for the night. Brooks earned a degree in political science from Jackson State University and a Master of Divinity from Boston University’s School of Theology, with a concentration in social ethics and systematic theology. Brooks also earned a Juris Doctorate from Yale Law School.

Brooks said he was delighted to be at SU, where he said so many people were wide-awake — unlike in some of his sermons from when he was a young preacher.

He began his speech by explaining that it is difficult for him to be responsible for giving speeches on criminal justice when there are deaths such as that of Eric Garner, an unarmed black man who was killed in New York City in July 2014 after a police officer put him in a chokehold. Brooks added that the nation’s system of mass incarceration is slavery by another name.

The U.S., Brooks said, is at a peculiar moment in history, a point of challenge and conflict in which there are activists in the streets, on college campuses and on the steps of Congress. He said the nation is in an impatient frame of mind.

“We find ourselves at a moment where we’re not inclined to wait for justice. We’re not inclined to wait for the promises of the Constitution to be delivered to a millennial generation on a baby boomer time frame,” Brooks said.

The nation’s false dichotomy, Brooks said, is reflected by people who say that one can’t say “black lives matter.” Those people, Brooks said, say you can only say “all lives matter,” without realizing that unless black lives matter, all lives will never matter.

At one point in his lecture, Brooks mentioned selfies, saying that older and younger generations are fascinated by holding their phones at an arm’s length and taking a picture of themselves.

“What would happen if we held a cellphone of conscious at arm’s length and we took a selfie of social justice?” Brooks said. “What would we find?”

Brooks also touched on discrimination in voting rights, highlighting that a series of laws have been passed in states such as Texas, Alabama and North Carolina that make it harder for people of color and millennials to vote. New restrictions for valid IDs have been established and voting polls have been removed from college campuses, he said.

In 2014, the number of young voters dipped to the lowest level ever, but Brooks said 2016 has to be the year in which youth return to the polls.

“It’s not enough to protest in the street if you leave the polling place absent and vacant and abandoned,” Brooks said. “We gotta move from protests to the polls. We have to move from holding signs to holding ballots. We gotta move from holding local officials accountable to holding elected officials accountable.”

Activism on college campuses has been very powerful, Brooks said, especially since the millennial generation has now eclipsed the baby boomer generation in size. Across campuses students are demonstrating that they can make a change by standing up and demanding change, he added.

Brooks said millennials are in a revolution of their own making, and added that he isn’t asking them to join the NAACP, but rather to lead it.

CORRECTION: In a previous version of this article, Cornell Brooks’ name was misstated in the caption of the photo. The Daily Orange regrets this error.

CORRECTION: In a previous version of this article, Jakia Warren’s position was misstated. Warren is the juvenile justice chair. The Daily Orange regrets this error.

Published on April 7, 2016 at 1:02 am

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