News and Letters Lead Article May 1998

A radical youth movement rises to confront global retrogressive times

by Kevin Michaels

Young people have been noticeably active in both the streets and the campuses across the United States in recent months, voicing their strident opposition to the retrogressive direction in which this country is headed. The most dramatic evidence of this trend was the sizable contingent of youth who threw a wrench into the works of the Clinton administration's plan to stage a globally televised war-preparedness rally in Columbus, Ohio in February. But across the country there have been numerous, less-publicized, manifestations of a spirit counterpoised to the prevailing ideology which states that capitalism is utterly triumphant, racism is an inerradicable phenomenon and there is no alternative to existing society.

Thirty years ago an international movement of youth which was radically opposed to the racism and imperialism of the status quo reached such proportions that it shook the ruling classes the world over and was the driving force behind a near-revolution in France. Despite the tumult of that year though, its potential was not born out in the achievement of a new society.

The world we live in today and the contemporary movements we are witnessing are vastly different from those of 1968. We should, however, examine what we are experiencing for its exciting potential to become a radical youth movement which will not be bound by contradictions of the past but instead will develop into an integral part of a challenge to capitalist society's barbarism.

Opposition to war has always been a hallmark of youth who are, of course, among those most directly affected by the decision to pursue politics by other means. When the Clinton administration decided to rattle its saber over the issue of access for United Nations weapons inspection teams in Iraq, youth across the country played an enormous role in organizing hundreds of demonstrations which for the most part went unreported by the mainstream press.

Much effort went into attempts to play down the impact of the demonstration at the Columbus war rally by attributing it to the sectarian left. But the reality is that an organization of students and recent graduates from across the Midwest had come together in a very short span of time to create the Columbus Coalition for a Democratic Foreign Policy. These students, from Ohio State University, Antioch College, Earlham College and other schools, communicated by telephone and electronic mail to bring together voices in opposition to a "racist war," as they declared in their chant at Ohio State University's St. John Arena.

Other organized forms of opposition to the possibility of war took place elsewhere. At the University of Minnesota, a boisterous student demonstration prevented United Nations ambassador Bill Richards from delivering the Clinton administration's line on the issue. And at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, a Marxist-Humanist student group was forced to challenge the school's policy against posting "position statements" on university kiosks in order to exercise their right to free speech in the form of a flyer denouncing U.S. war moves. San Francisco, New York City and Memphis, Tenn., were the sites of other demonstrations. Many activists continue to maintain contact, anticipating the possibility that the United States could again use the inspection issue as a pretext for hostilities.

Students have also been engaged in a wide variety of issues across the country in organizations such as the Free Burma Coalition, the East Timor Action Network, the Student Environmental Action Coalition and the Student Labor Action Coalition. Much of this activity, such as the efforts to get universities to divest from companies with ties to the repressive regimes in Burma and Indonesia, represents a continuity with campus anti-apartheid divestment campaigns of the 1980s. But the increasing affinity with the organized labor movement that has been in evidence represents a new and exciting dimension. Student solidarity with striking clerical and maintenance workers at Yale and Barnard College in 1996 is just one example.

Another new and important phenomenon is the large anti-sweatshop labor movement, proof of the size of which was evident in the large turnouts for the April 18 national mobilization to target Nike stores. Student activists have directed embarrassing questions at university administrators about the justifiability of signing million-dollar athletic endorsement contracts with a company that allows Asian contractors to operate factories in which workers, predominantly young women, are subjected to abuse and hazardous conditions in exchange for wages insufficient even for mere subsistence.

Their work is paying off. The University of California-Irvine has agreed to drop its endorsement contracts, and Duke University introduced an anti-sweatshop pledge.

Campuses are not the only places where youth are meeting with success. The young residents of the Edenwald Gun Hill Houses, a Bronx public housing project, have been involved in a campaign mobilize the youth of other public housing projects to give back their Nike footwear as a protest against the corporation's intense use of the image of Black athletes to sell apparel to youth while limiting all production to Asian countries. The publicity garnered by their visits to Manhattan's Fifth Avenue Niketown convinced the company to dispatch a public relations person to the housing project last year to try to dissuade the young activists.

A further new dimension to youth activity is the truly sizable increase in anti-police brutality and prison solidarity work. Two successive national mobilizations on October 22 as well as March's Jericho '98 rallies in Washington, D.C., Los Angeles and Oakland, Cal., brought out large numbers of high school and community youth to protest the everyday savagery by police forces which do not reflect the racial and ethnic makeup of the neighborhoods they lord over. Youth are also increasingly active in community organizations, often led by Black mothers whose children have been victims of police frame-ups or other abuse, who are rallying against brutal cops and the racist courts which are warehousing an entire generation in an explosively burgeoning prison system.

This diverse range of youth activity is taking place against a backdrop of dire retrogression. The severity of the recently announced statistical results of the success of California's Proposition 209 ballot initiative to scrap affirmative action programs in college admissions took many by surprise. The University of California system's flagship school, Berkeley, announced that only 255 Black students have been accepted for the fall semester, down from 598 last year. Latino students admitted will total 852, down from 1,411.

Similarly, a federal court ruling in Texas which declared affirmative action in admissions illegal has had a drastic effect on minority admissions to the cream of the state school system. The chilling message sent by the ruling has even affected applications to the University of Texas's law school in Austin, which dropped to only 111 Black students this year, down from last year's 225. Of the number who were admitted last year, only four chose to actually enroll in such a polarized and hostile environment.

Although proponents of Proposition 209 such as Ward Connerly argue that its results are simply a "correction" of preference shown to minorities, in reality it serves as an outright racially exclusionary measure.

A new reactionary ballot initiative aimed at the elimination of bilingual education programs, Proposition 227, was challenged by a huge youth march in Concord, Cal., on April 22. High school youth traveled from the Bay Area to not only protest Prop. 227, but also the subordination of educational needs to the criminalization of youth. Concord has a new jail, while Bay Area public schools are deteriorating.

California and Texas have been the vanguard in the campaign against affirmative action, but powerful racist forces in other states are biding their time. Residents of Washington State will weigh in on a ballot initiative to kill affirmative action this November.

This retrogressive trend to slam the doors of higher education in the faces of even the highest-achieving Black youth coincides with a disheartening statistical trend. The CHICAGO REPORTER published a story in February of 1996 that stated that while Black males between 20 and 34 years of age take their own lives at a rate less than white males of the same age group, the rate of suicide for young Black men has risen in the last 15 years. In Chicago, Black male youth commit suicides at a rate of 16.7 per 10,000, a higher rate than either whites at 12.9 or Latinos at 9.4. While it is difficult to draw solid conclusions from these figures, it can be said that they reflect a population under an enormous amount of social stress.

The criminalization of an entire generation of poor, Black and Latino youth is perhaps the most salient and repugnant feature of this retrogressive period. State legislatures across the country have debated lowering ages at which children can be tried as adults. The United States senate will debate a piece of legislation sometime this spring which can truly be called draconian. Titled the Violent and Repeat Offender Act of 1997, the bill, which has been passed by the House of Representatives, mandates the jailing of youth in adult facilities. The Children's' Defense Fund is lobbying against the bill.

The diverse range of youth activity, with its elements of labor, international and anti-racist solidarity, has enormous potential to develop into a movement which can challenge existing society. The youth movement of 30 years ago, which fired the imaginations of many because of its sheer scale and momentum, did not mature to carry through such a challenge because of its internal contradictions-sexism and hostility to the development of theory among them.

It is of the utmost importance to begin asking tough questions of today's movement at this very moment-when we are not even sure if such a movement exists-to ensure that the lessons of the '60, '70 and '80s to become internal to its activist-theoreticians.

We must ask if anti-sweatshop activity can develop into a challenge to a system in which the human activity of labor can be commodified. We must ask if the activity of those opposing the repressive regimes in Indonesia and Burma can take the ground of a revolutionary solidarity which will not be satisfied with merely bringing those countries into the circle of liberal democracies. And we must ask if anti-police brutality and prison solidarity work in the United States can develop into the deep and profound integrated anti-racist movement which is surely the prerequisite for revolutionary change in North America. In short, we must challenge the movement we may be seeing the beginning of to undertake the task of developing a philosophy of revolution.

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