Revolution#133, June 22, 2008
L.A. Locke High School Students: Don’t Be Played by the System–Fight to Change the World
Locke High School, deep in the southwest corner of Watts in Los Angeles, looks more like a prison than a school. It’s surrounded by 15-foot prison-style fences. Cage enclosures cover the entrance, allowing entry only through a guarded double door. Inside the school the feeling of a prison really comes to life. It’s a collection of separate buildings dispersed across a huge campus, and cell bar fences are a defining feature. Campus security patrols the grounds while the Los Angeles School Police maintain an on-site station, complete with an open-air holding pen for the students rounded up in daily truancy sweeps. Security guards patrol the halls with a vengeance, with drug sniffing dogs coming into classrooms at random to search students’ bags and belongings. In 2005 Locke graduated 240 of the 1000 students who started out in the 9th grade in 2001.
On June 10 something very special and very significant happened at Locke. In a powerful way, Black and Latino students came together in a strong show of unity—going right up against and defying the “divide and conquer” message and efforts of the media, the cops, and officials.
700 to 800 Black and Latino students, freshmen to seniors, brought something new, important, and liberating to the scene as they made their way to a Unity Assembly sponsored by both the Black Student Union and MEChA. More than a dozen teachers helped make the assembly a success. Some were involved in getting the space, helping the students to organize it, and inviting other teachers to bring their classes to it; quite a few teachers brought their classes to the assembly.
As students entered the gym, there were several Latina students handing them black and brown ribbons and many people rushed for them, helping each other pin them on right away—on their backpacks, on their pants, on their shirts, and in their hair. The message behind the ribbons was one that many students felt deeply, and some asked for a handful of extra ribbons to give to their friends who weren’t at the assembly.
As the assembly opened up, the sister from the BSU explained the importance of the ribbons and told everyone how to pin them on. Then the sister from MEChA called on all the students to wear the ribbons every day until the end of the school year. The Assembly featured three speakers: Christopher D. Jimenez y West, the History Curator of the California African-American Museum; Dr. Irene E. Vasquez, the Director of World Cultural Studies and the chair of the Chicana/ Chicano Studies Department at Cal State Dominguez Hills; and Michael Slate, Revolution newspaper correspondent and L.A. radio host. A young woman student was presented with a Courageous Resister Award by faculty members and fellow students both for courageously standing up to police brutality during the May 9 fight and for her work to bring Black and Latino students together to fight the system and not each other. Chicano artist Richard Duardo donated a print of his Frida Kahlo piece that was presented to this student.
The Fight and the Aftermath
The assembly was something students had been talking about for weeks. It came in the wake of a huge fight between Black and Latino students on May 9. 600 students fought with each other for half an hour and then 100 riot geared cops invaded the campus, clubbing everyone they saw, spraying clouds of pepper spray across campus, and arresting at least four students. Many others were detained at the school and released.
The media jumped like predators on the story. Scores of reporters poured into the campus and all emerged to deliver the same message: Black and Latino people (students and others) just can’t get along, they just seem to be compelled to be at each others’ throats and only the intervention of the police, with their clubs and gas, and other authorities can control this scene. This became a national story with articles in the New York Times and Time along with reports on National Public Radio. A very bad situation was being whipped up and rubbed raw.
Shortly after the fight, a statement from the Revolutionary Communist Party was distributed at the school titled, “Break Out of Fighting Each Other—Get With the Revolution! Fight the Power, and Transform the People, for Revolution.” [See Revolution #132, June 15, 2008.] The flyer resonated with a lot of students—especially the part about how the media seized on the brawl to sharpen up the contradictions between Black and Latino people—and meanwhile has had no interest whatsoever in covering stories of how Locke students, Black and brown, have come together against some of the outrageous attacks coming down on both Latino and Black people. Students were quick to talk about a walkout in support of immigrant rights on May Day 2006 and another walkout on September 20, 2007 in support of the Jena 6.
The Truth of the Situation
In the weeks after the fight, many Locke students continue to wrestle with what happened. Many of the students, and teachers, really want there to be unity between the Black and Latino/immigrant students—so much so that they try to deny that the fight was between the two nationalities, or that there is even a contradiction between the two. They talk instead about how everyone has friends of both nationalities or how people generally just co-exist, separate but peacefully.
But it doesn’t take long to get to the truth of the situation. Students explain that Black and Latino students generally hang out in separate areas of the school. They talk about how the Black members of the football team were really angry over the killing of a Black football player in another school—allegedly by a gangbanger who is an undocumented Latino immigrant. They tell of the tension in the neighborhoods and gangs divided up by nationality fighting over turf. A Black member of the drill team explains how things “get put in your ear” from family, friends, and the media, things like “Mexicans take all the jobs” or “Black people don’t want to work and will rob you.” A Latino teacher, widely respected among both the Black and Latino students, tells how Black students are systematically demonized and criminalized at the school with many of them starting out in the 9th grade with a clean record but ending up on probation a few years later. When he looked into why this happens, he discovered that one of the roads to probation and being put “in the system” are students being hit with excessive “tardy tickets.”
And there are real material conditions that help give rise to these divisions. There has been a dramatic shift in the population of Watts over the last few decades—from vast majority Black and a place recognized as a center of Black life in L.A. to an area where the population is now majority Latino, many of them immigrants. Locke High School has changed from almost all Black to 65% Latino. Many of the old industries where Black people could find some work have disappeared, replaced by sweatshop industries that thrive on super-exploiting immigrant labor. The youth unemployment rate in L.A. was 26.2% in 2004 and even higher in places like Watts. Many of the jobs that Black youth used to be able to get—in fast food joints or movie theaters—are now held by immigrants and older workers. Blacks and Latinos also find themselves increasingly competing for dwindling social services.
And on top of all this, there are conscious policies and actions by the system and its politicians and media—along with more “independent anti-immigrant forces”—that are aimed at both fomenting this contradiction and rubbing it raw. The killing of Jamiel Shaw, the Black high school football player allegedly killed by a Latino immigrant, was seized on to launch a whole campaign to rescind L.A.’s Special Order 40, which bars police from asking people questions about or arresting them for their immigration status. The anti-immigrant fascist Minutemen have held a couple of rallies in the Leimert Park area of L.A., a neighborhood that is a center of Black cultural life and in the middle of the historic Crenshaw district.
Powerful Show of Unity
The fight at Locke took things to another level and, although there have been times when hundreds of both Black and Latino students have come together around things like immigrant rights or support for the Jena 6, this fight brought all kinds of tension and questions out into the open. The statement issued by the Revolutionary Communist Party in the wake of the fight was distributed broadly at the school among teachers and students. It helped generate a lot of discussion and debate around what’s behind this Black and Latino/immigrant contradiction as well as why it will take a revolution to resolve this in any fundamental way. And, while many students and teachers want to unite—and some even have a sense of the strategic importance of uniting Black and Latino/immigrant people—there is still a question of whether this is possible and how to do it.
This is the mix that gave rise to the Unity Day assembly. Many of the students and teachers came to this hoping to be able to change the negative situation off of the fight into a more positive situation for the people. Christopher D. Jimenez y West, who is the first and only Black person to get a Ph.D. from the History Department at USC in 125 years, emphasized the common history and experiences shared by Black and Latino people, powerfully laying out to the students that there was a time when Black people escaped slavery in the U.S. by becoming “illegal” immigrants into Mexico. Dr. Vasquez also spoke to the importance of the unity between Black and Latino peoples, and then spoke to her efforts to help facilitate these students getting into college.
Michael Slate spoke to the horrific oppression both Black and Latino/immigrant people face in this society and how this isn’t accidental but the product of the capitalist system. He posed this terrible situation up against these same people fighting each other instead of the root of the problem. “This is the world you live in. This is what’s happening all around us. And in the middle of all that, you are fighting each other. And over what? My turf, my clique, my gang, my hood, my race, my nationality, and whatever other silly little thing comes up. And when you do that, this system loves to see it. They love to hear you talking their talk, thinking their dog-eat-dog ways. So, blind, you blame each other and let them off the hook—that’s called getting played. And think about this, all this my turf, my hood, my race, and so on, all can also end up in thinking ‘my country’ and joining the military to fight for a country that tortures people and is waging an endless war on the world. That’s getting played. And as long as you stay stuck in this kind of thinking, you will never get up out of this situation.” Slate pointed out that the world doesn’t have to be like this, that a new world is possible, but if anything is ever going to change people are going to have to break into a whole new way of thinking and fighting to change the world.
When the assembly ended, it was clear that things had changed. A new polarization is beginning to develop at the school. Some students stayed behind to talk with the speakers while others rushed off to lunch, classes or a concert. A number of students talked with each other about the “Youth Deserves a Better Future” unity picnic scheduled for the Saturday after the assembly. Most students left with a lot more on their minds and a lot more clarity about it. They left wearing the brown and black ribbons, and behind those ribbons there was a new sense of possibility for change. The air was charged with a sense of commitment and hope.
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