When Amaka Agwu’s little brother was three years old, he turned to his darker-skinned father one night and warned that his lighter-skinned grandmother was coming to get him. “That’s what white people do to Black people,” the little boy said. 

 “It was a very funny thing to hear a three-year-old say,” Agwu reflected, “and very interesting to tell him, ‘That’s not how that works.’”

Agwu, an 18-year-old gay student activist at George Washington University in D.C., laughed at the recollection, but who could blame a young person today for thinking that white people are coming after people of color? Or, perhaps, that the so-called “normal gays” are targeting trans folks? It’s on screens everywhere – from the couches and kitchens where three-year-olds roam, to the college campuses targeted by the likes of Turning Point USA and the young conservatives enchanted by its mission. 

Dinner conversations like the one her brother sparked are what spurred Agwu to activism. “My parents were always very cognizant about teaching us about different political systems and inequalities that exist in the United States,” she said.

Nowadays, Agwu feels disappointed that her fellow students aren’t rising to the moment that Donald Trump has forced upon them. 

“We just need to do better,” she said. 

Since the Civil Rights Movement, young people have been at the vanguard of political protest in the U.S., from North Carolina college students launching nationwide lunch counter sit-ins, to the death of four Kent State undergraduates who were shot by National Guard troops while demonstrating against the Vietnam War, to encampments on college campuses across the country protesting Israel’s invasion of Gaza. In all of these, students came to symbolize not just the causes they were fighting for but a generational struggle for change.

But those and other iconic protest movements, like nuclear disarmament, the invasion of Iraq, apartheid in South Africa, and Occupy Wall Street, involved single issues or ideas to rally around. This time, it’s been harder for students to focus amid Trump’s flood-the-zone strategy.

Add to that attacks on higher education (including student visa restrictions) explicitly designed by Trump advisors like Stephen Miller to undermine a liberal worldview on college campuses, and you have a successful effort to divide and conquer dissent.

Agwu saw the writing on the wall during the Biden administration, with the slew of anti-trans state legislative attacks and the passage of Florida’s notorious Don’t Say Gay law that inspired copycat legislation around the country. “I was seeing all that, and I was like, ‘Wait, there’s now a president in office who actually isn’t going to fight against it, but on all that will actively support those types of things?’”

She describes Trump’s inauguration one year ago as “scary.” 

“I just felt like this deep-seated fear entangled with how the country would go.” 

“He’s kind of exposing underlying currents of conservatism that have already existed in the United States that just haven’t been fully addressed,” she said. “Now we have a president who’s willing to exploit those to get power.”

“I think he’s just making us fully aware — and the people who weren’t aware of it to begin with — that these deep-seated, hateful notions still exist, and that we just need to do better to fight back against them.”

Rise Up 

Agwu is fighting back as the head of logistics for the “startup” activist group Revs Rise Up, a play on the school’s revolutionary school mascot. 

“Basically, we’re trying to fight against authoritarianism with the Trump administration,” she said.

Their latest action was a banner signing and letter drop demanding that GW refuse to join Trump’s so-called university “compact” dictating anti-diversity initiatives and assaulting academic freedom. 

“No one’s really gone out and rejected it, right? And we’re saying our school should preemptively reject it before you start requiring that all schools start to accept it.”

For Agwu, Trump’s requirement for sex assigned at birth on passports ranked as his most egregious attack on the LGBTQ+ community, a literal manifestation of his effort to erase trans identity from American society.

“In a very legal sense, it delegitimizes someone’s transition journey, and it’s inherently harmful to thousands upon thousands of trans people who have gone through the process of medically and/or legally transitioning,” she said.

It’s one example, Agwu explained, of Trump’s thirst for power.

Asked if change can be effected on screens, Agwu, who’s studying international affairs and English, replied, “Not entirely.”

Social media is “a very easy and very powerful tool to help people learn more about issues,” and to “see themselves as though they’re being involved,” Agwu said.

But she cautioned against “hashtag activism.”

“If people only engage in that, it doesn’t enact effective change,” she said. 

“You still need to get people who are going out onto the streets, or who are lobbying to their Congress members and going and saying, ‘We need this to change, because this matters to me, and this is hurting thousands of people.’ So I do think it’s a great tool, but it’s not entirely what will generate change.”

The cost of caring 

Cailey Chin, a freshman studying economics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, says Trump has dominated her history and politics education since elementary school.

“My first memory, I guess, was my library elective, and they made us debate the Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump race, and we had a fake election about it, which I think was a little bit too advanced for third graders, but nonetheless, it was still a debated topic within my school.”

Chin’s activism started several years later, in high school, with a failed effort to expand sex education in her Pennsylvania school district. By that time, a previously bipartisan issue had become contentious in her swing state county.

The growing red-blue divide “definitely affected” her efforts, Chin said. “I was pushed back. I was ignored oftentimes.”

At Penn, she works with a group called Our Space, which connects Philadelphia-area high schoolers and her school’s LGBT center through educational sessions focused on comprehensive sex ed, “like healthy boundaries, communication, and things targeted specifically at queer youth.”

That’s a segment of the population under direct attack by the Trump administration and its allies, with executive orders attacking gender beyond the binary, bans on queer content in school libraries, and federal funding slashed for gender-affirming care.

“Just being able to connect and having a safe space to talk about these topics and educate our youth” ensures they’ll be “well-equipped to fight back,” she said.

Chin called Trump’s first year back in office “harrowing” and cited cuts to HIV funding and his failure to acknowledge World AIDS Day as two of his most grievous actions.

“HIV is a very bipartisan issue that obviously does not just affect the LGBTQ community, but disproportionately affects it,” she said. “Cutting these funds only harms the entirety of our nation and really hurts the health of not just queer people, but people in marginalized communities, people of color, people in poor communities.”

Chin said there’s a clear understanding among students at Penn of the harm caused by the Trump administration, but thinks the Ivy League’s competitive culture is holding students (including herself) back from public protest, both IRL and online.

“UPenn’s pre-professional culture, alongside just like fear in general, makes people very quiet in terms of political issues,” she said, “and I can relate to that. Sometimes I’m hesitant to talk about my activism or just do simple things like this interview, because of my digital footprint.”

“If employers see that I’m outspoken and that I’m passionate about the things that I am passionate about, it might lead to me losing a job.”

Ironically, though, Chin has a large online presence focused on another cause that’s been caught in the Trump administration’s crosshairs: equity in education.

She counts over 34,000 followers on Instagram and hundreds of thousands of likes on TikTok for her content advising high schoolers on how to ace college admissions applications.

Chin said her work online is a matter of accessibility.

“Social media, obviously, is accessible to a large amount of people with their phones. Via my content creation, I’m able to provide information at no cost to anybody following me, and those people following me and viewing my content come from a very diverse set of backgrounds. So that really helps in spreading information and getting things out there, whether it be advocacy or not.”

Red pill or blue pill

Trans student-activist Amber Va describes Trump’s worst actions as legion, and defined by the tragic flaw in his “Make America Great Again” slogan.

“Truth be told, it was never that great in the first place,” Va said.

“And now you have this great big bill that’s enacted, along with attacks on trans people and the trans community, and the passport recognition, and right now, especially, with the ICE raids — you know, it’s just really insane.”

For Va, a 24-year-old sidelined from school by the pandemic and now a freshman at Valley College in Los Angeles, “The [anti-trans] stigma that’s been going on in the media that we’re forced to believe” is personal. She was already facing it among her Cambodian family.

“It’s all intertwined,” she said. “The intergenerational trauma and now the political climate.”

Her own experience living as a trans woman and queer person of color inspired her advocacy work. She serves on the queer youth advisory committee for the Foundation for California Community Colleges and partners with nonprofit organizations to get resources to young people in her work as a grassroots community activist.

She wants to parlay a communications degree into a queer-focused public relations specialty.  

Regarding the attention economy, Va agreed that young adults and teenagers are focused on social media but need to exercise discretion in who they listen to.

“There’s a bunch of social influencers who will do it just for clout, you know, just for attention,” she said of some influencers’ advocacy. “It depends on who you talk to and who’s a credible source.”

But community is where you find it, she said.

“There’s a lot of people throughout the nation who can’t attend protests because of the era we’re in, or where they are. We’ll take as much support as we can for the rallies, the marches, for protests, for sit-ins and all of that, you know? I mean, that’s what I count as community. There’s only so much you can do within your power and for your safety.”

Va likened the choice to resist Trump’s onslaught to Neo’s in The Matrix, before the right-wing manosphere co-opted that movie’s message.

“You have the red pill, or you have the blue pill, take your pick.” Either way, “You don’t know what you’re getting yourself into.”

Then Va turned to a more definitive movie analogy.

“Like, in Star Wars terms, I’ll join the resistance, right?”

Never surrender 

However young people may choose to resist, Va advises them, “Everything takes time.”

“Something I learned from my activism is that patience is a virtue,” she said.

Students may be in some kind of interregnum right now, caught between the rise of the #metoo, Black Lives Matter, and trans rights movements and Trump’s broad assault on everything “woke,” along with the overall radicalization that historically follows similar illiberal backlash.

If young people like Va are looking to movies for their cultural cues, One Battle After Another is another more contemporary example, drawing on militant groups of the 1960s and 70s, like the Black Panthers, the Weather Underground and the Symbionese Liberation Army — all armed in deed or simply rhetoric — to depict a level of resistance equal to the assault they’re confronted with; orthodoxy on both sides of the political spectrum comes in for a critical beating.

The message, like Va’s, is that the struggle is never-ending.

Despite a portion of Agwu’s student body “who seem a bit jaded, like there’s nothing we can do,” she does see fresh evidence of young people stirred to action. An appearance by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on campus in December inspired a “huge protest” against Trump administration policies, even during finals.

“We are the closest school to the White House. I can see it from my dorm,” she said. “Because there’s such a large population of students who came here specifically because they want to study political science or international affairs in the capital of the U.S., it’s a very politically charged environment.”

While “there hasn’t been enough protest and action,” fellow students are “willing to fight for or against whatever they personally believe,” she said. It’s her role as an activist “to empower and inspire other people to enact change and participate in their own way.”

“So many students are very energized to fight back.”

Chin considered whether the Trump era is a “blip” in history or an enduring turn to authoritarianism.

“In the face of resistance, you still have the ability to make change in your local community, in your state, at the national level. It’s not impossible,” she said after cataloguing her own efforts and disappointments. “I think that it’s important to remember that this is just a temporary wave.”

“You might feel discouraged, and you might feel like you’re helpless, but there are still people that want to connect with you. They want to fight back with you, and they want to unite to make change.”

Va reached back to words spoken by Black Panther Party member Assata Shakur from prison in 1973, a call to action for those ready for a reckoning.

“It is our duty to fight for freedom,” Va said, quoting Shakur. “It is our duty to win. We must love and support each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains.”