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So a lot of youth, when they go into the principal’s office, they’re scared. Unless they want to argue, or they’re mad or frustrated, they don’t want to speak to no adults. Because adults have their role in society, their so-called role in society, and youth have their so-called role in society, which is to shut up and listen, and you don’t know nothin.’ (Bert, twenty-year-old YP intern) I am attending a YP weekend retreat in a large, log cabin in the woods about seventy miles outside of Oakland. We have been driving in vans for hours just to get here, crisscrossing freeways and negotiating the tangled mess of stop-and-go traffic rushing in and out of the Bay Area. Finally, the cityscapes give way to rolling hills, and we arrive. The students are giddy with excitement to be in the woods. They hardly ever get the chance to breathe clean air and stick their feet in an ice-cold river on a summer day. They hardly ever get the chance to leave the endless concrete of their Oakland neighborhoods. After spending an hour or so exploring the woods outside, the fifty YP teen activists converge in the main cabin to begin the retreat. It is in this log cabin where they will spend the next forty-eight hours mapping out their coordinated plans for political organizing at each of their Oakland high schools for the upcoming school year. Tevin and Naomi, juniors at Brookline High School, have decided that we would begin the weekend retreat with a fun and energizing icebreaker. But like all YP games and icebreakers, this one also contains an important message that is designed to reinforce the students’ political identity and 133 4 Toward Youth Political Power in Oakland The Adult Gaze, Academic Achievement, and the Struggle for Political Legitimacy commitments. Even with scheduled fun time, nothing is wasted. These kids are always doing politics. This icebreaker happens to be called the dance game. We split up into two teams and name them the Players and the Revolutionaries. I am on the Revolutionaries team. Tevin and Naomi hold out a small basket filled with pieces of folded paper. On each piece of paper is written the name of a popular dance. A student on the Players team goes first and picks a piece of paper out of the basket and covertly shows it to the rest of her teammates. All of them giggle and survey our team, trying to decide which one of us they will pick to perform the dance. The rule is that the chosen person must perform the dance for everybody. If the person performs the dance well, then that person’s team will be able to guess the dance correctly and win a point. If the person performs poorly, then the other team gets the point. The Players whisper among themselves and pick me to perform the dance, because they guess that I won’t know the dance, or won’t be able to perform it well enough for my team to guess it. I stand up and they show me what is written on the small piece of paper. It reads, “go stupid,” and represents another defining moment that underscores the cultural distance— shaped by age, race, ethnicity, and class—between me and these kids. I whisper to Tevin and Naomi that I have no idea how to “go stupid.” They shrug and give me no hints and whisper unhelpfully, “You have to do it. Just go for it.” I stand in the middle of the room and the crowd counts down from three to zero. I struggle to come up with something. When they say, “go!” I do my version of going stupid, my arms and legs flailing, my eyes crossed, and my tongue sticking out. I feel like a complete idiot. But my team shouts in unison, “go stupid!” They guess the dance correctly and we win the point. I feel relieved that I didn’t let my team down, and I wonder how one really goes stupid correctly, in style. Naomi says, “Okay, now we pick the next dance and you all have to guess what dance it is.” She and Tevin look through the basket and pick one specific paper out of the basket that nobody has picked yet. They read it and whisper to each other, and then when we all...

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