We Fight To Win: Inequality and the Politics of Youth Activism

Introduction

1 Introduction In February of , mainstream media outlets covered the massive and simultaneous antiwar protests that shook hundreds of cities across the world. Activists from almost every corner of the earth marched in the streets, numbering in the millions, to protest the impending invasion of Iraq. Although the sixties are often identified as an apex of political activism, the  marches made history in terms of the sheer numbers of people participating in the antiwar demonstrations. If the news cameras were to zoom in on the crowds and were to look beyond the spectacle of people’s collective outrage spilling into the streets, they would have caught a variety of groups coalescing together: environmentalists, workers , antiglobalization activists, war veterans, elderly people, churchgoers, families, teachers, college students, and even children. These groups did not appear in the streets haphazardly or randomly; many were mobilized long before into carefully organized campaigns for social justice. Behind these massive demonstrations were leagues of civic organizations and tireless organizers who worked daily to organize their communities for social change. If the cameras would have zoomed in even closer, they might have noticed that some of these core community organizers were teenagers. Although already politically active, most of these teens worldwide did not yet have the right to vote in formal elections. Many of them were not even old enough to drive a car. In one corner of the world, I first met some of these teenage organizers at a peace rally in Portland, Oregon, during the autumn of . Under a banner that read in thick, black-painted letters “Students Rise Up,” about twenty teens crowded together for warmth against the cold Oregon rain among hundreds of other antiwar Portlanders. This is the first time I met Curt, Shae, Troy, Joni, and other core organizers of the SRU student network , a group of politicized high school students across several Portland area high schools that began organizing against two troublesome and simultaneous developments: unprecedented school budget cuts and the impending war in Iraq. Over the next two years, I would come to know these and other student organizers in SRU. I would watch as sixteen-yearold Sara, outfitted in leggings and heavy black boots, waved her sign that read “Stop the war! Fund our schools!” high above her head and skipped to the front of the weekly antiwar marches in Portland. She and her friends would bounce to the beat of the raggedy antiwar drum corps that kept the marchers moving through the streets. I would witness seventeen-year-old Travis sneak away from a wide circle of students protesting school budget cuts inside the Oregon State Capitol. I would watch him as he climbed a huge marble staircase to unfurl a gigantic banner spray-painted in capital letters “SMART KIDS, NOT SMART BOMBS,” only to see him be swiftly shooed away by a security guard. I would walk behind sixteen-year-old Troy, dressed in all black, who coolly and confidently led several hundred youth through Portland’s streets in a solemn march protesting what SRU called the “death of education.” Behind us, in a sea of youth, SRU students held high a huge papier-mâché coffin in which other students ritually laid to rest their school textbooks. The core SRU organizers were all white and middle class, and openly recognized the white, middle-class dominance of the SRU network. In meetings, SRU organizers expressed vexation over their inability to draw more students of color from Portland schools that were located in the city’s largely segregated Latino and black communities. The SRU pioneers, boys who were marginally active in the anarchist movement in Portland, recognized that there were no clubs at their schools that provided good vehicles for antiwar activism or activism around school budget cuts. They identi- fied a need for a student movement that could connect these two concerns and that could span several high schools. They lamented that there were no school clubs that allowed for direct action tactics and vowed to cultivate some. WE FIGHT TO WIN 2 Just over six hundred miles south of Portland, I first encountered Youth Power (YP) teen organizers the following spring at a proeducation, anti-incarceration coalition meeting in downtown Oakland, California. Coming to this meeting from high schools all over the East Bay, black and Latino teens as young as fourteen years old introduced themselves and the youth...