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Conclusion
- Rutgers University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
In the two years I spent with YP and SRU activists, I witnessed their challenges , successes, and defeats. Anchored in larger historical and contemporary movements, YP organizers in Oakland fundamentally changed their school landscapes: at some schools they successfully instituted youth centers that provided a proyouth, empowering respite from their defeating experiences of schooling. They created student committees to meet with their school administrators over curriculum design and organized multiracial unity days that emphasized racial alliances: radically altering their schools’ depoliticized and divided multicultural celebrations of diversity. They protested the California High School Exit Exam and were instrumental in winning a two-year delay in the institution of the test. They protested the war in Iraq, leading massive student walkouts. In Portland, SRU activists mobilized teens from across the city to lobby adult voters around tax increases for schooling. They created new student unions and new activist clubs in their schools and captured local media attention by orchestrating citywide student sit-ins and walkouts. They threaded the concerns of public school students into the antiwar protests and rallies that shook the city. They marched down to the mayor’s office and demanded that she come down to talk to them about why the city was unable to fully fund their public schools. They took the lead in organizing a community-wide free school to fill the educational gap that would be left by early school closures. 199 Conclusion Clearly, these accomplishments reflect teens’ efforts toward rejecting the model of citizenship-in-the-making, which posits that only as adults will young people ever engage in critical thought, turn critical thought into political action, and dare to change the structures and processes that impact their everyday lives. Their efforts show that adolescents are quite capable of naming social injustices, envisioning the changes that need to be made, and strategizing toward turning those visions into concrete realities. Processes of Disruption: Youth Resistance and Youth Agency The creation of underground newspapers, student unions, and campaigns to institute ethnic studies into their classrooms stand as evidence of adolescents ’ capacities to subvert the many prescriptions for their political passivity, even if these efforts take place at individual schools and ultimately do not come to fruition. As youth movements expand outward from schools into cities, young people access more organizing skills, political action frames, and alternative political educations that subvert their prescribed passivity as youth. Through these connections to larger social activist networks , students transform themselves from passive and disempowered youth into capable organizers and educators. These practices enable adolescents to become political actors, teachers, and organizers long before the state, schools, mainstream media, and even families recognize them as legitimate and capable participants in social decision making. Racial and class systems of power play key roles in determining the structure of youth political resistance, specifically in relation to the young adult mentors who facilitate their political development. White, middleclass youth in Portland and low-income youth of color in Oakland have structured their movements very differently in relation to these mentors— a reflection of the ways in which youth movement organizations are shaped within larger systems of inequality. In Oakland, for example, students ’ social locations as racially subordinated, impoverished youth required the strategic integration of adult allies for specific purposes. Adult allies in YP served as links to social services and as adult faces for a particularly devalued student population in ways that relatively privileged white, middle-class students did not require as they became activists. In contrast, SRU activists, to subvert adult power in the making of their WE FIGHT TO WIN 200 [44.200.23.133] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 20:16 GMT) movement, formed a youth-only structure and cultivated youth autonomy in ways that impoverished youth in Oakland could not. These different structures of youth movement vis-à-vis adult society, structures that have in part been determined by students’ locations in other systems of privilege and power, shaped the ways in which white, middle-class radical youth and low-income youth of color politicized and subverted adult power in their understandings of age inequality. As teen activists wrestle with ageism and the model of citizenshipin -the-making, they also develop strategies to confront the adult gaze that delegitimizes them as serious and valuable political participants. While both middle-class, white students and impoverished students of color wrestle with this gaze, the strategies they develop to successfully get their wins on campus and in their larger...