News
Major events shape Gen Z views, protests
By Auzzy Byrdsell
A month before Faith Andrews-Owens was born in 2001, terrorist hijackers steered airplanes into New York City’s Twin Towers. When she was 11, in February 2012, a self-described neighborhood watchman in Florida shot dead 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. In December of the same year, a gunman killed 20 kids and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut.
In 2020, the year Andrews-Owens graduated from high school, a Minneapolis police officer murdered George Floyd and the COVID-19 pandemic began. And, in 2024, student protests about a war between Israel and Palestine led to Columbia University canceling her graduating class’ commencement ceremony.
“We exist in the legacy of so many mass systemic failures,” said Andrew-Owens, of events that shaped the lives and involvements of Generation Z, those born between 1998 and 2012.
The major events marking their lives may be part of why Gen Zers, compared to earlier generations, voted at a higher rate in the first midterm election where they could cast a ballot, according to a Tufts University analysis of Census data. In 2022, 28.4% of Generation Z voters participated in those midterm elections. By comparison, 23% of Millennials voted in the 2006 midterms; 23.5% of Gen Xers voted in the 1990 midterms; and 27.9% of Baby Boomers voted in the midterms in 1974, the first year the Census tracked such data.
Edelman’s 2022 “Trust Barometer Special Report [on] Business and Racial Justice in America” concluded that 70% of Generation Zers had been involved in a social or political cause. Those causes have ranged from climate change and police brutality to gender equality, gun control and other issues.
“We’re taking the approach,” said Andrew-Owens, one of the Columbia protesters, “that, as we enter adulthood, we can no longer let the world happen to us. We have to do something,”
The canceled commencement ceremonies didn’t trouble her. “If it’s via protests, social activism, the vote, it’s finding ways to get our voices heard,” she said.
Coming of age during so many volatile moments in history has made many Gen Zers more resilient, said Michael Solomon, who graduated last May from the University of Southern California, which also canceled this year’s graduation festivities.
“You have universities in Gaza being fully destroyed and people who don’t even have the opportunity to get a diploma,” Solomon said. “It’s incumbent on people who have that privilege to walk that stage and even get an education to speak up for those who can’t and are being marginalized.”
Acting on their beliefs is how many students are making a mark and trying, in their own way, to be on the right side of history.
“When I look back ten years from now,” Andrews-Owens said, “I hope that I feel proud of the fact that I was able to have a positive impact on my campus and the world around me even if it was at the expense of a commencement.”