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The Revolutionary Potential of the Third World Strike
- University of Minnesota Press
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and emotionally. I didn’t do a lot of introspection. I was on automatic pilot. Academically I was on my way to completing the requirements for my master ’s degree. Then the big split in the BPP hit. I’d been away from the party and I didn’t see it coming. Then I had my personal life and personal plans. I have to admit, at the beginning of the strike, I didn’t think the cause was all that significant. After fighting hard on the streets of Oakland, the Berkeley strike seemed like a petit bourgeois struggle for upward mobility. I now see the importance of the strike. Number one, we practiced the idea of Third World solidarity. We hung in there tight, we hung in there tough. That’s why we won. Second, we created a new revolutionary concept. Together with the San Francisco State strike victory, this was the first time Ethnic Studies was part of the education system. The strike itself wasn’t a total victory, but it set up the framework for developing the Ethnic Studies Department. Third, in the long term, many of the students who participated in the strike returned to their communities as professionals. Those individuals set up programs and organizations, some of which have survived to this day. Fourth, the strike provided an inspiration to other student groups throughout the country and that continues to today. This wasn’t just within the U.S. We inspired student movements worldwide . This was dialectical in nature because the revolutionary movements throughout the Third World were an inspiration to us. I was personally connected to some of the militants in Japan who were fighting the war in Vietnam and opposing the reemergence of Japanese militarism. Frantz Fanon as a radical intellectual certainly affected all our groups. The African American students ate him up, so did some of us in AAPA and MASC. The Cuban Revolution stood as a reference point for us. I remember being stunned when I heard that after the revolution, their big plan was education and literacy programs. I thought the first thing you do is make bigger guns to defend yourself. But many Cubans went into the countryside to teach the campesinos how to read and write. I didn’t realize that creating a literate people is the best defense against oppression . So we too were doing something important in struggling for liberation through education. THE REVOLUTIONARY POTENTIAL OF THE THIRD WORLD STRIKE The Duality of Formal Education “I didn’t see the strike as that politically important.” This is a surprising statement from one who provided tremendous leadership to the Third “It Was about Taking Care of the Collective” World strike. Aoki’s admission that he “wasn’t paying too much attention” is revealing of his radical politics. In the s, Richard saw formal schooling as having a dual function as a progressive and regressive force.43 On one hand, Aoki made plans, beginning with his return to full-time studies at Merritt College, to use his education as a means to obtain personal economic mobility. On the other hand, he was developing a radical critique of the U.S. educational system. Aoki would have agreed with Troy Duster’s analogy of the British colonial education system in India to warn against the co-optation of ethnic elites. In the Daily Californian, Duster recounted a debate in midnineteenth -century British-controlled India about the kind of education the Indian elite should receive. Lord Macaulay won the debate in favor of Western training. Duster, then a temporary instructor without security of employment , boldly stated: “The Academic Senate and the Regents will join to argue that there is only one kind of real education for the black elite, the MexicanAmerican elite, the Asian elite, or any ghetto elite. The Academic Senate follows Mccaulay [sic].”44 Aoki feared the U.S. minority elite, like the Indian elite, would use their education to discipline the protest and radical aspirations of the disenchanted majority. In the absence of a critical pedagogy and equal access to higher education, Aoki saw the mainstream curriculum as perpetuating the status quo by teaching a history of the privileged, by promoting notions of meritocracy , and by diminishing the power of institutionalized racism and class exploitation.45 Militaristic Strategies, Collective Organizing, and the Strike Victory The duality of education produced in Aoki an ambivalence about the revolutionary potential of the struggle for Third World studies. But being at...