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

1: The Development of Urban Teenage Activism: Opportunities and Challenges at the Turn of the Millennium

One day, sixteen-year-old YP student organizer Salvador and I roamed around East Oakland on city bus after city bus, trying to find local restaurants that might be willing to donate food to Youth Power. That day, Salvador told me this story of his lone attempt to access the highest executive power in the United States: I wrote a letter to the president, and he sent me an autographed picture. Like, I talked to him about all the issues around my neighborhood and stuff, like drug dealing and violence. And he sent me a response saying, “Well, here’s the information you requested.” And it’s like, I didn’t request any information! It’s like, “Thank you for writing,” and this and that, and “Here’s an autographed photo,” and this and that. And, you know, that shows how ignorant he is. When my brother went off to war [in Iraq], my father just ripped that photo up. He burned that picture. As he spoke, we passed blocks and blocks of dilapidated houses that crept up the low Oakland hillsides like Brazilian favelas—the closest thing to shantytowns one might find in the United States. Salvador shook his head in disgust as recounted to me this first and last attempt to access political power as an individual teen without a movement behind him. In light of the controversies around election fraud, the electoral college system, and low voter turnouts, individual access to executive decision making is certainly problematic even for voting adults. For teenagers who are, by 18 1 The Development of Urban Teenage Activism Opportunities and Challenges at the Turn of the Millennium definition, without voting rights at all, it is nearly impossible. As Salvador illustrates, the paths to political agency open to youth are few and far between. Adolescents do not have established channels for political participation through which they can speak to and be heard by powerful adult decision makers. This poses a problem for many young people who are both aware of and concerned about the political, social, and economic crises affecting their communities. These crises are many and are propelling young people to seek agency and influence through one of the few political routes open to them should they claim it: social movement activism. But why do youth form youth movement networks, networks that articulate with, but are distinct from, adult movement organizations? Why don’t they simply join any number of social justice organizations that already exist in their communities? The fact that students seeking political participation in social movements seldom walk out of their usual settings like the family, school, or mall and into any number of social justice groups in their communities speaks to the extent to which social movements, like electoral politics, are often adult dominated and age segregated. Many of the youth featured in this book told me stories of how they had been dismissed , overlooked, or shut out by adults in adult-dominated organizations such as local peace organizations. Some had never even joined adult groups, as they anticipated that they would be marginalized. Thus, it never even occurred to them that adult organizations could be a route to their own political participation. Indeed, youth movements stand as testaments to the way politics is not meant for adolescents, whether electoral or social movement–oriented. At the same time, youth movements also signify an instance of collective youth agency, which, unlike many forms of subcultural agency, is explicitly and self-consciously political. Adolescents’ battles to weigh in on important social and political issues require that they transgress the line between symbolic, developing, and eventual political beings and actual political actors with voices and presence. This chapter outlines the larger geographical and historical contexts for rise of youth movement networks such as Youth Power (Oakland) and Students Rise Up (Portland). Youth social powerlessness is constructed within particular historical epochs and geographical locations. Indeed, the strength of taking a social constructionist view of youth is that it focuses our attention on the ways in which age, as an axis of inequality, changes DEVELOPMENT OF URBAN TEENAGE ACTIVISM 19 over time and across place. Young people’s strategies for contesting their subordination are also geographically and historically bound. Thus, to understand the ways in which youth constitute a subordinated group in society, and also to understand sources of youth political agency through collective movements, we must turn...