Members of Gen Z have been described as the first “digital natives.” Unlike the rest of us, advanced technology isn’t something they have had to learn. It is their first language.
After just a few moments speaking with Sanchi Rohira, a senior at Georgetown University, it was evident that her generation could also be described as “justice natives.” She is one of their most promising leaders.
Rohira was awarded the David Noor Youth Activist Award at the 2024 Summit for Religious Freedom, hosted by Americans United for the Separation of Church and State. In her acceptance speech for the award, she quipped, “Telling a young person of an injustice is like telling a kindergartener that one of their friends is sad. We have too long to go on our journey to cynicism to accept injustice as a part of life.”
I visited with Rohira shortly after accepting the award. The following is a portion of our conversation. It has been edited for length and clarity.
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Craig Nash: Congratulations on receiving the David Noor Youth Activist Award. Have you always considered yourself an activist?
Sanchi Rohira: I’ve always been interested in stories, history and the broad concept of justice. But I first became an organizer when I was 15, after the Parkland shooting. I was first involved in the gun violence prevention movement and then, from there, just became interested in more issues as more crises erupted in the country.
CN: Since you were 15 when Parkland happened, the same age as many of the victims of that tragedy, I imagine your class is very much an “activist class.” Did you find that to be the case when you came to Georgetown?
SR: There is a large network of organizers on campus who may be interested in different issues but may show up to these types [religious freedom] of fights. But there is a spectrum. I’d say the majority of people may feel a call to action in some way, whether voting or signing a petition here or there, but who I think they may feel generally disillusioned or less eager to question.
CN: What do you say to those who are disillusioned or who don’t want to get involved?
SR: The framing I tend to use is to tell them, “If you are feeling tired, disillusioned or attracted toward conformity and routine, that is by design. They want you to feel like that.”
It is okay to feel like that, but I encourage people to step outside that framing now and then to see what people are feeling on the other side. I also ask what part of their life and identity allows them to feel like that. Because I do think it is an issue of privilege, and some people don’t have the luxury of being tuned out. Their lives are on the line every day.
Another thing I bring up is the question of solidarity. If you are feeling comfortable today and able to turn a deaf ear to all these different fights happening, that luxury is very fickle and potentially in danger. We’ve seen this on our campus. For example, I’ll just throw this out. In the South Asian community, there is a tendency not to want to get involved in difficult conversations but to focus on school, do as well as you can, make your family proud and try to get as far ahead as possible.
Editor’s Note: Rohira is Indian-American. She has spent half her life in the United States and the other half in India. Her faith tradition contains elements of Hinduism and Sikhism.
And that is great, but it makes them try to stay away from conversations where people in other marginalized communities have been facing massive struggle and violence.
But then a day came [at Georgetown] when two South Asian students faced a hate crime, and that kind of shook things up a little. It raised this point that the comfort and luxury you feel now are not guaranteed at all times if you are not a very specific type of person in America. And so you might as well have a more proactive approach, where you constantly try to tackle deep issues in your life, integrating them in whatever little way you can.
CN: The Summit for Religious Freedom this year is focused on the dangers of White Christian Nationalism. What has been your experience in that area?
SR: The number of people who would be considered “White Christian Nationalists” [at Georgetown] is definitely a very small minority. But it is less simple than that. It’s more like, in the same way you don’t necessarily have racist and actively anti-racist students; the largest systems of oppression don’t function simply by having some people be their victims and some people not.
Instead, there is a spectrum and different degrees by which some people buy into these ideologies. So, while there are probably only a handful of students who are actively White Nationalists, there is a far larger group who, to some level in their ideological formation and formation, have bought into certain premises. They either sit in silence or on the sidelines and then, if you ask them a question and then keep asking why, then maybe the tenth time, you’ll be able to identify a White Nationalist idea. And so, I haven’t had interactions with clear-cut white nationalists, although they do exist.
My friend, who is black, experienced a hate crime two years ago on campus where she had death threats and very explicit racial slurs hurled at her by a younger student. But the bigger issue is not that there is a small handful of white nationalists on campus. It is how the institution decides to deal with that once it does happen. The larger problem than that incident itself was that we saw white nationalism baked into the school’s response.
CN: Could you share more about their response?
SR: The incident happened, and my friend filed a bias report and a report with the university police department. She didn’t hear anything back for months, even though she kept following up. The school wasn’t proactive about the complaint she filed. Eventually, the Institutional, Diversity, Equity and Affirmative Action (IDEAA) office said that campus police had lost the incident footage.
They had the security camera footage and took some screenshots of it. In the screenshots, the suspect’s face was blurry, and months later, the footage was lost.
We got multiple responses to what happened to the footage. One office told us the server crashed. Another told us storage was full, so they had to delete footage to make room–in 2022, “storage was full,” and the footage they had to delete was of an alleged hate crime. Their answers did not inspire confidence.
They argued that they could not do anything about it because there was no video footage and the screenshots were blurry. To make matters worse, they placed a mutually binding no-contact order on my friend and the suspect, meaning that the suspect could not reach out to my friend and that my friend could not name the suspect.
CN: This seems to be common among universities. [I mentioned my connection to Baylor University, which has had its own history in this area.]
SR: The institutions work hard to protect the identity of the suspect. Whereas, while we are out here doing this work and organizing sit-ins, the identity of the victim has to be extremely public for any amount of accountability to take place. And it can be completely life-ruining and life-changing where you are at this university with thousands of students, many of whom are constantly coming up to my friend asking questions. I feel bad because it happened during my friend’s junior and senior years. Her final years of college were defined by this incident and all the organizing it took to address it.
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Sanchi Rohira will graduate from Georgetown in May. She continues to be passionate about organizing and plans to spend her time from now until November working to help political candidates fight for justice. The probability that you will hear her name again is exceptionally high.
According to the AU website, “The Youth Activist Award is named in honor of the late David Norr, who staunchly backed the principle of church-state separation and generously supported Americans United for more than 25 years.”
Senior Editor at Good Faith Media.
