Make Some Noise: Activists, Lawmakers Urge Change in Darfur

For his master’s thesis in genocide studies, U.S. Rep. Tim Walz, D-Minn., grappled with how education about genocide had failed. History classes had, rightly, incorporated thorough study of the Holocaust, he said, but “we did such a good job of teaching it that students tended to take it as an anomaly out of history, in a bubble, and view it as something that was perpetrated by madmen and people that are insane.”

Years later, as a high school teacher, Walz took on a “gratifying and terrifying” project with his five classes: using data about economic, ethnic and environmental contexts around the world, they tried to predict where the next genocide would occur in hopes of preventing it. Four out of five classes determined that Rwanda was the most likely site of another genocide. Three years later, in 1994, as ethnic Tutsis and their Hutu sympathizers were being executed — more than 500,000 would eventually die — his students called him up and asked, “Why didn’t anyone do anything? Why didn’t this government step in?”

On Sunday, Walz, U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, Rep. Keith Ellison and Dr. Michael Barnett gathered with more than 500 grassroots activists at Plymouth Congregational Church in Minneapolis to ask why a modern-day genocide continues in Sudan with little outrage