His Video on Black Men’s Frustrations Went Viral. Now He’s Getting a Ph.D.

People still recognize Sy Stokes, who once stared into a video camera and called his university a “racist corporation.” He still gets messages from strangers who’ve watched that video, viewed more than 2.3 million times on YouTube since 2013. That was the year he found his voice.

Stokes, then an undergraduate at the University of California at Los Angeles, wrote “The Black Bruins,” a spoken-word poem describing the frustrations he and other black men faced there. One day a friend filmed him, flanked by other black students, delivering the words on the steps of Campbell Hall. When the five-minute video went viral, Stokes became a hero and a villain. He echoed the concerns of minority students at predominantly white colleges, yet angered many people, too.

The experience both drained and inspired Stokes, the subject of a 2015 Chronicle profile (“A Young Man of Words”). After graduating from UCLA that year, he earned a master’s degree in education from the University of Pennsylvania. He’s now pursuing a Ph.D. in education at the University of Southern California. And he’s still writing poems and producing videos.

In “Dear White Counselor,” he addresses his high-school counselor, who, he says, told him he couldn’t get into UCLA and other selective colleges. “The Counternarrative” is a where-are-they-now look at the men who appeared in “The Black Bruins” — and a response to the backlash it provoked.

In an interview, Stokes discussed the complexity of race, the evolution of campus activism, and the power of poetry.

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“The Black Bruins” still has a hold on you, and it still seems to resonate with other people, too. Why?

It has a life of its own because its themes are always relevant. The issues I was talking about aren’t going away. The demands we had for our university are very similar to the demands students from older generations had. Change is a slow process, especially when it comes to institutions.

What’s the biggest difference between the Sy Stokes we see in that video and the Sy Stokes of today?

Perspective. The biggest thing that I didn’t understand as a 20-year-old was that you have to control what you can control and forget about what you can’t. You can’t control other people’s actions — you can only hope to influence or inspire them. I had this mentality that I could change the perspectives that people had had for an entire lifetime. Now I have to appreciate incremental changes. I can’t be discouraged if I don’t see some epic change immediately.

How do you see campus activism today?

The biggest change I’ve seen is that all these identities are being included in efforts to create change on campuses. It naturally brings complications. Every marginalized community on campus is going to have their voice heard, and it gets really complex when there are so many people.

Way back, there was more of a black-and-white binary. Now you can’t leave out anybody, and you shouldn’t leave out anybody. There’s more of an understanding now that the experiences of black men and black women are way different. A big complaint about the video was that it didn’t have the perspective of black women at UCLA, and that was justified.

Your identity, like that of many Americans, is complex. Your father is black. Your mother is Chinese. How did your own family histories lead you to the questions you’re exploring as a doctoral student?

What I’m interested in is multiracial activist identity. How do people navigate their different identities but still feel like they belong in certain spaces? For me, not being black enough, not being Asian enough, has always been a problem, because I don’t fit the typical mold. We have an obsession in this country with monoracial stratification, to the point where multiracial people slip through the cracks and don’t feel like they have a valid voice.

No matter what kind of person of color you are, you’re going to have certain experiences. And there are certain things that white males will never experience.

What have you learned about the power of words — and their limits?

Words can incite and inspire change, within a person or an institution. We pursued changes at UCLA based on the video’s popularity. That was the power of words.

But our actions behind the scenes were far more important. We applied for grants to get money for resource centers for black students. We pushed for a diversity requirement. We were constantly putting together policy memos, meeting with administrators, figuring out what kind of programming was needed.

Words without action are meaningless. We didn’t want “The Black Bruins” to be just a poem.

In “Dear White Counselor,” you address your high-school counselor, whom you recall saying that highly selective colleges like UCLA weren’t “realistic options” for you. But she’s not really there. Have you considered going back to talk to her face-to-face?

I’ve been wanting to for years, but I believe she retired. I’m not going to show up at her house or anything. But after I get my doctorate, I’m going to send copies of all three of my diplomas to her in the mail.

A lot of people have reached out and said that their high-school counselor told them the exact same thing: Look for more realistic options. Their stories are disturbing but also inspiring, because people are like, “Yes, I went through this, but I found a way around it,” or “Somebody else believed in me despite what my counselor had said.”

Agree or disagree: The way selective colleges assess applicants’ potential often works against low-income and underrepresented-minority students.

The standards for entry are built within the same system that oppresses those students. The measurements are based on the assumption that everyone goes to a high school that has enough resources to provide them with access to Advanced Placement and honors courses. A lot of schools don’t have that. So how do you measure somebody who — and it’s not their fault — goes to one of those schools with very limited resources? It’s not on the same scale if you’re comparing them to students from rich, white neighborhoods where the schools offer every AP class.

We don’t put enough money or effort into recruiting underprivileged students. Colleges see a certain test score and just completely discount them, even though they never had access to test prep, even when their grade-point average is a 4.3. But if colleges see something special in 16- or 17-year-old athletes who are good at basketball or football, they’ll invest in those kids from the jump.

You graduated from a high-profile university, earned a degree from an Ivy League institution, and enrolled in a Ph.D. program at another prominent university. How might you respond to an old friend who said, “Damn, Sy. You’ve become one of the elite!”?

I think it’s the exact opposite. I’ve become a lot more critically conscious of everything I come across. My opinions are backed by research. As I learn more about the system, I’m able to see different avenues for disrupting it. I didn’t understand who all the players were, like boards of trustees at universities, until relatively recently. When “The Black Bruins” was going on, I didn’t know who we were talking to, the importance of each person, the power they hold, how to push their buttons.

Do you see yourself teaching at a predominantly white college and mentoring minority students one day?

Yes. The goal is a Tier 1 research institution. The reason I am where I am is Tyrone Howard [a professor of education who directs the Black Male Institute at UCLA]. He’s done things for me that I wish I could do for a cohort of students one day. That’s really the power of mentoring.

Your other new video, “The Counternarrative,” reintroduces the men who appeared in “The Black Bruins,” listing their academic and professional achievements. Each shot includes a racist comment posted on the original video. The juxtaposition is powerful.

I definitely did want it to be a visual juxtaposition, to represent the “counternarrative,” as critical race theorists would call it. It’s kind of what W.E.B. DuBois talked about with the double-consciousness theory: Black people have this ability to understand one consciousness, which is how the world sees them, and the second consciousness is how they perceive themselves. You have to constantly balance that. We needed to show that this is how the world perceives us, and this is how we really are. This is the world we live in, but this is the world that I’m still surviving in.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Eric Hoover writes about admissions trends, enrollment-management challenges, and the meaning of Animal House, among other issues. He’s on Twitter @erichoov, and his email address is eric.hoover@chronicle.com.