As Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration draws closer, tensions are high across the nation. City on a Hill Press sat down for an interview with Ayo Banjo, a prominent UC Santa Cruz alumnus and current organizer, to discuss how students can exercise agency and stay empowered leading up to and following Donald Trump’s second presidential term.
Banjo sits on the climate action task force for the City of Santa Cruz and works with various nonprofits and government entities to help them deliver their programming and marketing services to their audiences and clientele. While at UCSC, he was elected Student Union Assembly (SUA) president his first year, making him the youngest SUA president in UCSC history. In addition, he founded UCSC’s chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and later headed the NAACP’s Youth & College Division across California and Hawaii.
Editor’s Note: Answers have been edited for clarity and brevity. This was published alongside Tiffany Dena Loftin’s conversation of January 20th and Beyond.
Interviewer: You were a prominent student leader at UCSC during the last Trump presidency. Can you tell me how it felt to lead during that time?
Banjo: The Trump presidency felt very personal to me because we were dealing with issues on campus that the Trump administration was fighting against. A lot of the work that we did surrounded creating somewhat of an identity that stitched together everyone’s diverse backgrounds despite religion, despite gender expression, despite all these other areas.
We were in a very unique time where people of color were being threatened by some of his policies. Muslim students were being threatened, DACA students were being threatened. There were all these different coalitions that we wanted to create a safety net around, and so we did.
Interviewer: You founded UCSC’s first ever NAACP chapter, which then acted as a pivotal force in the Black Lives Matter movement in Santa Cruz. How were you empowered to organize as a student leader?
Banjo: I was trying to position [UCSC’s chapter of the NAACP] as an opportunity for students to do something about major issues they were seeing around them. To use this organization as a tool and an instrument to help close the gap when it comes to racial injustice; the issues we’re seeing in policing, the issues we’re seeing in housing, and people of color being disproportionately impacted.
You have to first create the foundation of agency within the person and they have to believe it for themselves. But it’s not about controlling the outcome, it’s about allowing for the process to play out. That’s really giving people an opportunity to develop their own mental toolkit of how to see the world in a way that puts them in the position of an agent that can do something about it.
To be your authentic self is to be a true leader. It’s when people can relate to you, can connect with you, can see themselves in you. To be your authentic self is to create a sphere of protection around you because they know your intentions. The same way, unfortunately, they give Donald Trump a benefit of the doubt because he doesn’t feel scripted. Even though he says the worst things in the world, he still has a lot of support because he felt more authentic than Kamala Harris.
I think that in order to build a large enough majority that not just codifies our future, but protects the people who are gonna be vulnerable to the Trump administration, we have to give them something of value that equates to what they need and not just talking points that are buzzwords that help us to identify with people.
Interviewer: How do you feel communities that have been impacted in the past by Trump, and will be impacted after Jan. 20, can practice self-care while still exercising agency?
Banjo: You’re speaking to the culture of burnout. True leaders, true organizers, are ones that uplift the people in their communities. They don’t demean, hurt, or destroy. They create, they build, they uplift.
I can spend my time creating an identity around my opposition, or I can create my identity around what I believe.
Protesting is a very specific resource that you use in times of desperate need. We’ve normalized this tool that ends up getting fuel from people’s outrage, which leads to people feeling drained at the end of it. We don’t really think about the art of creating demands — the vision has to be created before we even start protesting. Protesting is used as a tool to pressure administration to act and to act quickly, and now you have an administration that’s just [accustomed] to the tool of protest. You really have to be mindful.
And some people may take this conversation and think, ‘oh, are you saying we have to moderate ourselves and start presenting ourselves in a certain way?’ I’m just saying that you need to be your authentic self. Be really strategic in your escalation.
So I think the biggest question both for the Democratic Party on the national level and for students at UCSC is, where are you going? What is your vision, your goal? You’re not gonna mobilize people or organize people … if you don’t have a clear vision of what you’re fighting for. The Democrats failed because all they did was create identities around what they’re fighting against. That’s it, anti-Trump.
That’s not enough. We can’t take for granted people’s desire for change. It’s a good thing that people are in a place where they are willing to make radical bets on people in order to get that change, we just have to position ourselves as the change. We need to get very specific on exactly what is stopping us from having the type of campus that we want to see.
