"I said up with the People, yeah yeah! I said up with the Students, yeah yeah!"

Spring Break Take Action, Class of 2010

New Endeavors

My name is Jeanette Charles and I've been a member with the Strategy Center for two years and co-coordinated Spring Break Take Action. In the last week of March youth from Westchester, Cleveland and University High Schools participated in a week's worth of workshops and organizing focused on "The War on Drugs, Gangs, and Poor Black and Latino Communities." We embarked on many new endeavors that explored different ways to understand and process the "No to Pre-Prisons" Campaign as youth organized on the buses, had social justice guest speakers, attended an action at City Hall and focused their thoughts and energies through using popular theater tools and literature. Youth participants' engagement in these varied forms of learning pedagogy and their participation in the Strategy Center's current campaign, 1,000 More Buses, 1,000 Less Police, offered them a larger understanding of these conditions.

One of my first times visiting and actively engaging with the Strategy Center was during the 2008 Spring Break Take Action where I first organized on the bus, learned more about analyzing and deconstructing the racist re-enslavement complex and when we marched on the 5th anniversary of the US war in Iraq. It was my first time doing a lot of political work in such a short period of time! Yet, I learned greatly from my experiences the days I attended and two years later, working with Community Rights organizers on the vision, practicum and pedagogy has challenged me in many ways to further my understanding of a critical as well as collective teaching process and developed my relationship with the campaign.

1,000 more houses, 1,000 Police

Esperanza Martinez, an organizer with the Bus Riders Union, chanted during the circle-up with the Los Angeles Community Action Network (LACAN) following their victory at City Hall. LACAN moved our Los Angeles City Elected Officials to set up a meeting in their community, on their time to discuss the critical issue of housing and homelessness in Los Angeles. This action brought to the forefront housing as a human right, which has been privately held for so long, and conditioned many of us to consider homelessness as a personal consequence rather than systematic attacks against working class communities of color. So much, that during Monday's activity in our youth's presentations of what makes up the social welfare state, they did not immediately acknowledge housing as a human right. The youth's involvement with 1,000 more buses and 1,000 less police, campaigning to expand social services and community reinvestment over expansion of the ever growing prison-police state, encouraged them to consider all aspects of how the racist re-enslavement complex and policing of our communities oppresses and devastates Black and Latino communities.

The next two days, SBTA youth took to the buses. Some of my most memorable moments with the Strategy Center have been those two to three hours on the buses heading down the Crenshaw line or heading to the East with the people I have encountered and shared conversations with on their way to work, school and home. Alex, Ashley, Diamond and I organized along the Vermont line and I was amazed by the youth's fierceness. Alex and Diamond, their second day of organizing, were bold speaking with people who often times, I had passed up because they declined a flyer or avoided eye contact as I began to walk their way. Their contact lists grew from one day to the next and it was wonderful to see their confidence rise as they spoke with more and more people engaging them in the issues that already affect their lives and yet whose challenges of finding a job, providing for their families and just getting through the day discourage them from getting involved with organizations like the Strategy Center's Community Rights Campaign.

Stonewall, "Welfare Queen" and Conditions for Womyn in Prison

One of the newest features of Spring Break Take Action were our seminars dedicated to how policing and incarceration have impacted womyn of color and queer folk. It's important that in this discussion of mass incarceration that we don't lose sight of the layered complexities that patriarchy involves. Our conversations on the LGBT movement and the involvement of transgender people of color as the leaders against police repression and the fight for basic civil rights were interesting as I've found most discussions about the movement allow for hetero-normativity. We learned about the stigmatization of Black womyn through the US government's attacks on the welfare system which historically has privileged white men providing services reaching as early as Civil War veterans. Now, the "Welfare Queen" label, fueled by the Reagan administration, wrongly depicts Black womyn as the source of US societal problems ranging from inadequately raising their children and living lavish lifestyles. This violence against Black womyn draws many parallels with the conditions facing womyn in prison that have historically been forcibly sterilized and sexually harassed/abused. We focused a lot of our discussion on incarcerated mothers and pregnant womyn in prison. I'd like share two important passages from "Prisons as Sites of Reproductive Injustice" by Rachel Roth, she writes:

"An African American woman serving time in a California prison was diagnosed with an ovarian tumor. When she went in for surgery, she was given a hysterectomy to which she had not consented. As she explains: ‘[The doctor] tried to convince me to have a hysterectomy, saying that the tumor could grow back, and I was 40 years old and wouldn't have children anyway...They destroyed all possibilities of me having children...Whether I would or not, I should have been allowed the choice."

Another testimony from a pregnant womyn in King County Jail in Seattle, Washington explains:

"I was placed in a small one room cell with ten and sometimes as many as fifteen other womyn. I was forced to sleep on a mat on the floor, sometimes near the overflowing toilet. Never being allowed out of the cell, I could do nothing more than stand, squat or lay for the entire thirty days. I was not allowed milk or juice because the other inmate could not have the same. It being the month of August, temperatures were soaring. There was no air conditioning or even a fan. I was truly miserable. I repeatedly requested medical attention, but to no avail...They would promise that I would see the jail doctor the next day, but tomorrow never came."

The forced sterilization of incarcerated womyn, largely womyn of color, and the conditions facing expectant mothers reinforces the racist re-enslavement complex's analysis of the prison system not just as an economically exploitative institution but also perpetrating the genocide of oppressed nationality people, namely Blacks and Latinos. The breakup of families and the prevention of womyn's human right to reproduce are destroying our communities and we need to challenge incarceration and the laws that make criminalizing our people as lynching was during the height of Jim Crow and working Africans to death during colonial slavery.

Gangs into Revolutionaries

"Tough on crime" laws that have clear racially discriminatory undertones such as Operation Pipeline, Three Strikes, and court decisions such as Terry v. Ohio, are part of the Prison/Police/War State attacking and targeting our communities and the policies that have put 2.3 million people in prison today-majority of whom are Black and Latino.

The youth we work with are criminalized on the daily, from coming to school late to the way they dress; the consequences of institutionalized racism against working class communities of color. The laws governing our state and nation legalize the violation of civil and human rights and promote racial discrimination. With Operation Pipeline, a training program started in 1984 teaches law enforcement to identify drug trafficking and suspects. In 1986, Operation Pipeline informed officers that "Latinos and West Indians dominated the drug trade and therefore warranted extra scrutiny". Officers have been trained to search "people with dreadlocks and cars with two Latino males traveling together... [and] listed the following as identifiers of possible drug couriers: Colombian males, Hispanic males, a Hispanic male and a black male together, or a Hispanic male and female posing as a couple". The targeting of our communities is blatant and it's vital that we understand the legal intricacies at work in order to defend and protect our people while also challenging these very laws that make it possible for an officer's interpersonal racism to persevere and be supported by larger institutions.

In his session, "The History of Gangs", Manuel Criollo encouraged all of us to think of life as a tree. Not necessarily the "tree of life" that blossoms from the well being of Mother Earth (though I do love her); rather, as a tree whose roots reveal a deeper set of factors like fear and survival than the above surface foliage that deceive us into believing policing should be the necessary protocol against violence . Though, how often do we as a society think about the root causes of violence? We aren't encouraged to think about the relationship between "crime" and poverty or gang violence and lack of resources in our communities. Over and over again, working class communities of color are indoctrinated to believe that we are inherently violent, "bad" people.

The idea of Gangs into Revolutionaries struck me because of this relationship to how we're taught to think of our community as infested with criminals. Rather, this idea of gangs into revolutionaries challenges us to consider our next door neighbors, siblings and friends as inspiring intellectuals, people ready and willing to organize, to take action. We are taught that gang members are synonymous with criminals and at height of internalized racism in our communities and the messages coded in the media equate working class communities of color as criminally infested and violent. We must begin to consider our youth as blossoming revolutionaries whose analysis of the world and their constant fight against ticketing, police frisks and other forms of criminalization stifle this process. While there is violence in our communities, we need to question, why? And what are the root causes for the violence we see or are conditioned to believe is more prevalent now than decades ago. And, how can we point to gang violence as one of the leading causes of death as police brutality and incarceration are the foundations for genocide of our communities.Gangs into revolutionaries isn't a question of the future but the present, youth are intellectuals, artists, visionaries and trailblazers in our communities and we need to return to fostering healthy and productive relationships in our neighborhoods.

On Friday, we read from Soledad Brothers: The Prison Letters of George Jackson and he like many others, was an incarcerated Black man, an organizer and a revolutionary part of the Black Panther Party. Reading his letters, written from prison to his mother, spoke to this same message of gangs into revolutionaries because Jackson despite his "criminal" past was an educated man who mobilized and motivate people from inside prison. Challenging ourselves to think in different ways proves to me how SBTA is planting the seeds necessary to challenge the racist re-enslavement complex by engaging our youth in this discourse, empowering them to think of themselves as revolutionaries in training instead of what the system calls "at-risk" and criminals.  

Theater of the Oppressed: Engaging in Social Change

I think most people have seen the Bus Riders' Union's Super Pasajera, the transit superhero who spends her days fighting against fare hikes, bus line cuts and organizing with the people of Los Angeles finding ways to challenge the racist transportation authority. Our use of popular theater and street performance is one of the ways to engage with people, often times share a laugh but more importantly be critical of the inequalities we see around us every day. We had a guest facilitator, Shruti Purkayastha, who used meditation and improvisational theater to tap into our own family histories and relationships to our daily environments such as school and home. She asked us to closely think of our favorite places, people and family members, what we would say to each other and what we would be doing. I was really impacted by her workshop because it was the first time in while where I had to reflect deeply on my relationships to people and places in a different way. Responses like Laura Gutierrez's, a youth from Westchester, whose favorite place was sitting in a tree at the park by her school because all she envisions is yards of green grass was the complete opposite of her school. After our meditation session, we had to come up with an idea for a short skit where we could play out a problem and come up with a solution. I was surprised how eager everyone was to act out and take on different roles in a scene. The youth decided on taking on the issue of the lack of support and guidance they experience from counselors. We had a teacher, a counselor, parent, student, principal and a constant flow of new characters like assistants in the office. As we set up the challenges of counselor-student relations, we then took a moment to reflect on what needed to happen for things to change. We had a parent-teacher-counselor conference, and suggestions of a parent forum as well as presenting these issues to LAUSD as the lack of funding and support for counselors in schools. Look out for us at your school, on your street and maybe even on the bus!