by A group of students from Bloomington, Indiana, launched an online political journal, Liberation Colorized, earlier this year in an effort to involve more young people in local politics.
Anusha Nadkarni, one of the journal’s creators, explained: “A lot of times students aren’t really asked for their opinions, or those opinions aren’t valued, solely because they’re students or youth. I thought that some sort of decentralized journaling platform that didn’t belong to a school or some sort of organization would be beneficial for students to have a choice and feel valued in the community.”
Liberation Colorized has a writing team with more than 24 members, and covers a wide range of topics, including local politics, race, culture, gender, sexuality and education.
““When I’m angry, I write. After the meeting, I wrote a lot,” another writer, Savvy Sleevar, said following a school board meeting. “It’s really disheartening to see … youth are so impacted by these sociopolitical issues, and we’ve been forced to mature really fast in this very contentious environment. While we have to experience it, we’re rarely ever given an equal platform to speak upon it. So when adults were trying to shut very dear friends of mine down at a very disrespectful way at those school board meetings, I wanted to have a platform to regain that student autonomy that we’re very often denied.”
Nadkarni said: ““A lot of it is motivated by fear. We’re growing up in an era that’s more diverse and more self-aware of the issues that have been occurring than ever before. As a minority myself, as someone who goes to school with a variety of minority and marginalized students, I don’t think we have a choice to turn a blind eye, or a choice to just ignore what’s happening. Because whether we like it or not, we are affected by some policy that’s happening today.”