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Title: NO! Against Adult Supremacy Vol. 1
Author: Samantha Godwin, Kathleen Nicole O’Neal, Cevin Soling, Damien Sojoyner, Marc Silverstein
Language: en
Topics: adult supremacy, parenting, child rights, child liberation, anti-oppression, unschooling, youth liberation, school, youth, kids, NO! Against Adult Supremacy
Source: Retrieved on february 29, 2019 from https://stinneydistro.wordpress.com/index/

Samantha Godwin, Kathleen Nicole O’Neal, Cevin Soling, Damien

Sojoyner, Marc Silverstein

NO! Against Adult Supremacy Vol. 1

Children’s Oppression, Rights, and Liberation, by Samantha Godwin

Excerpt: academia.edu/2046034/Childrens_Oppression_Rights_and_Liberation

(Citations Omitted)

The legal, political, scientific and media discourse prevalent in

previous generations promoted the idea that race and gender are

biologically determinate categories with biologically determined

attributes, characteristics, and social roles. Historically, many

anthropologists and psychologists believed they had found physical

evidence that non-white people had an inferior capacity for reason and

rationality. These supposed differences fit into an imperialist ideology

of a ‘white man’s burden’ that justified the systematic oppression of

indigenous peoples through-out the world. Black people were said to be

intellectually and morally inferior to white people and as a result,

unable to take care of themselves without the supervision of their white

slave owners. The myth of a biological basis for male domination over

women has persisted for even longer. Both those who defended the

historical relegation of women to second class citizen status under the

law and the contemporary anti-feminist backlash have relied on a belief

(often backed by superficially scientific-looking evidence of the

inferior female mental capacities) that men are more capable, at least

on average, of fulfilling a variety of important social rules than are

women. Anti-Suffragette propaganda held that women’s minds were not

suitable for politics or public life. These supposed mental differences

were said to causally explain why women were excluded from politics.

This reasoning was also used to normatively justify female exclusion

from politics as a necessary consequence of having to protect women in

general and from the burdens of public responsibility in particular.

In addition to the paternalistic justifications for white dominance over

black people and male dominance over women—arguments that fit the

pattern of “group A must have legal power over group B for the best

interests and protection of group B”—the white chauvinist and male

chauvinist ideologies also employed a somewhat different normative

justification: an appeal to the good of society, where the subordination

of black people and women was said to be necessary for society to

function. Defenders of slavery for instance claimed that the institution

of slavery was necessary for a functioning society and economy.

Similarly, the subordination of women to their husbands was widely held

to be necessary for the stability and wellbeing of the family, and

hence, society at large. In both instances, the biological differences

between subordinate and dominant demographic groups was said to both

causally explain the social relations of domination and subordination,

while also providing a normative justification for why those social

relations were good, natural, and desirable.

Today, the subordination of children to adults in general and their

parents in particular is similarly seen as being both caused and

justified by children’s inferior mental faculties. Both the paternalism

argument (children must be subordinate for their own good) and the

social necessity argument (children must be subordinate for the good of

society) are advanced to support the legal disabilities of children. The

parallels with “scientific racism” and sexist neurological theories

should be obvious: we are frequently told that children and adolescents

are mentally inferior due to their underdeveloped brains, and this

inferiority renders them incapable of behaving rationally or

responsibly; in the past, precisely the same claims were advanced

against women and black people.

Many people will instinctively reply that the racists and male

chauvinists of nineteenth century were wrong about black people and

women, whereas our scientifically superior contemporary society is right

about children and adolescents. There are good reasons however not to

leap to this conclusion.

A chief way the black civil rights movement and women’s rights movement

responded to racist and sexist stereotypes was not to deny that there

are discernable differences between races and genders that might

(mistakenly) be called upon to justify social hierarchies, but that

social hierarchies themselves produced these differences. In The

Mismeasure of Man, Stephen J. Gould argues that measurable

“intelligence” does not casually explain the inferior social status of

racial minority groups, rather the inferior social status of racial

minority groups contributes to their relatively worse average

performance on “intelligence” tests: the characteristics that racists

appealed to in order to causally explain the conditions of white

dominance could themselves be causally explained by the fact of living

under white dominance. In Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human

Societies, Jared Diamond argued that Eurasians have been politically

dominant over the rest of the world’s population not because of some

biological, cultural, intellectual or moral superiority, but because of

their geographic advantages; resources like horses, metals, and

sufficiently large populations to develop disease resistance

structurally advantaged them against populations who lacked those

resources.

Similar explanations have also been advanced for gender differences and

hierarchies. The cultural materialist anthropologist Marvin Harris

argued that patriarchal, male dominant family arrangements arose when

agricultural societies developed livestock driven iron plows: men were

better equipped for this type of more efficient farming that became

economically dominant, and so their social dominance followed from their

control of the most efficient means of production. In The Dialectic of

Sex (1970), Shulamith Firestone offers a different explanation where she

argues that while the physical differences between male and female roles

in reproduction explain how male dominance developed—the feminine

character traits cited as reasons why male dominance should persist are

themselves products of female oppression.

The purpose of these arguments is not to show that it is impossible to

explain the status of subordinated demographic groups in reference to

their biological differences. Rather, it is to demonstrate that there

are social structural or material explanations that can also account for

the social hierarchy and the perceived differences between demographic

groups. Given two possible explanations— one sociological, the other

biological—where the variables are impossible to control for (we cannot

take a child and put him or her in some other experimental social

arrangement, nor can we put an adult in a social position identical to a

child in our society)—there is no way for us to determine how much of

children’s childishness is the result of their innate attributes and how

much is the result of their social position.

What does it really mean when we say that a child’s brain is “still

developing”? This is often construed to suggest that the changes that go

on in a child’s brain over time are teleological in nature— they begin

at a low level of development and lead to the end point of a superior

adult level of development, so we only give people adult rights and

responsibilities once they have fully reached that superior level. This

narrative however has minimal scientific support. The reality is that

there is no fixed adult level of brain development where brains

plateau—rather brains continue to change over the course of someone’s

lifetime. Myelin levels in the brain, often cited as ‘proof’ that the

teenage brain is still developing, not only continue to increase through

teenage years, but well into middle age, at which point they decline.

Psychologist Robert Epstein surveyed the literature on adolescent

neurology studies and concluded that they were misrepresented in the

popular press in several ways: the changes observed continue to take

place through our lives, and research has thus far only shown

correlations between behavior and neurology, but has not demonstrated

causality, and it is well known that experience can alter brain anatomy,

and studies are often simply misrepresented and overstated. Epstein

notes that while all of our behavior, thoughts and feelings are in some

way reflected physically in our brains, it does not follow that

something particular about our brains is the cause of those actions or

emotional states. According to Epstein, environments, studying, diet,

exercise, stress, and many other activities alter the brain—so if

adolescents have problems, pointing to brain differences does not show

that their brains caused the problems as the problems could cause the

brain differences. There are also numerous differences between child and

adult mental capacities where children actually have superior mental

abilities. Visual acuity peaks at the onset of puberty, and incidental

memory abilities peak near twelve years old before declining, so young

people actually have an organic advantage in learning new things.

Intelligence researchers J.C. Raven and David Wechsler using different

intelligence tests found that “raw intelligence” scores peak between age

thirteen and fifteen and decline through life. Needless to say these

differences between child and adult mental capacities have not been

prominent in political and media discourse about children’s capacities

and rights.

The focus on the difference between adults and children ignores what is

at stake from a social justice perspective in according children equal

rights. Even to the extent that there are significant natural

differences in capacity between most adults and most children, these

differences do not necessarily justify all or most of the social

structures that privilege adults against children. Just as biological

differences between men and women do not determine the specific

socio-economic (and, historically, legal) advantages of men over women

(such as coverture), the biological differences between adults and

children do not determine the form that children’s legal status takes

with regard to adults. Even if we were to grant for the sake of argument

that, implausibly, all people under the age of eighteen have inferior

mental capabilities to all those over eighteen, this is hardly an

argument for assigning civil rights only to those with superior mental

capabilities over eighteen. Reasonable people rightly recognize that

those allegedly (or even demonstrably) more rational and intelligent

should not enjoy greater rights than those with lesser capacities for

rationality and intelligence—we do not see legal caste hierarchies

arranged by IQ points or brain size as legitimate or just ways of

organizing a society.

Despite the considerable variability in the roles children have occupied

in society, people continue the mistake of thinking children’s status is

something inherent to children, rather than a condition imposed on them

by the state and society. For instance, in Schall v. Martin, the Supreme

Court permitted pretrial detention of children for longer periods than

permitted for adults, under the theory that such detention was not

punitive, but merely regulatory, in part because children have fewer

liberty interests than adults—they are always in some sort of custody

Do children really have fewer liberty interests as an inherent result of

their childhood, or has the state already deprived them of their liberty

under its ‘regulations?’ It would seem that the Schall Court did not

find any pre-trial punishment of children because children are generally

treated in a way that would be recognized as punitive if applied to an

adult. In this case, the status of a child’s liberty is the result of a

child’s legal status, not a child’s biology.

It is dangerous from the viewpoint of someone concerned with wrongly

depriving others of liberty to assume that children’s apparent

capacities necessarily exclude them from possessing rights, when their

effective capabilities are constrained by the way they are treated in

society. If a child were capable of exercising equal rights competently,

how would we be able to recognize it in a society that deprives them of

any opportunity to do so? If we cannot tell whether or not children are

capable of exercising rights in a society that enables them to do so,

because we are only familiar with children in the context of a society,

which prevents them from exercising equal rights, then the assumption

that children are naturally incapable of having rights is unjustified.

Prevailing Attitudes Towards Children

There are additional reasons to be suspicious of the common impulse to

accept research that seems to confirm adult assumptions about children.

Dismissing out of hand the possibility that children could exercise

greater control over their lives is attractive, easy, and convenient. It

is convenient because it is easier for adults to deal with children if

children have few state-enforceable rights that can be mobilized against

adults when adults attempt to control their lives against their wishes.

Many adults also tend to just really like the idea that children are

child-like and profoundly unadult-like: that they are cute, innocent,

irresponsible, and dependent without the possibility of autonomy.

Educator and child rights’ advocate John Holt writes:

When one person sees and deals with another not as a unique person but

as an example of a type, whether Celebrity, Black, Sex Symbol, Great

Genius, Artist, Saint, or whatever, he diminishes that person and makes

it hard for any natural relationship to grow between them. This is what

we do to children when we see them as Cute, Adorable, Innocent. For the

real child before us we substitute some idea of Childhood that we have

in our minds and deal with that. Often, when we label someone in this

way, we invest him with magical properties, sometimes bad, sometimes

good . . Men often do this to women they consider beautiful . . Having

turned the child into an ideal abstraction, many parents and teachers

tend to look at him much as Rocket Control in Houston looks at a moon

shot. They have a trajectory (life) all mapped out for this child, and

they are constantly monitoring him to see whether he is on the path or

whether he needs a little boost from this rocket (psychologist) here or

a sideways push from that rocket (learning specialist) there . . They

have their own precise notions of what a child should be. They tend to

slip very easily into condescending sentimentality as I have described.

Holt’s observation reveals what we in some ways already know, that

adults judge children according to what plans and expectations the

powerful adults in their lives, their parents and teachers, have for

them. If children are not under parental control, following a

parent-defined path rather than their own desires, adults judge them to

be out of control. If it is often thought that if children are left to

their own devices they will make a mess of their lives, this is in part

because parents, teachers and other adults presume to define what is

valuable in their children’s lives and what would constitute making a

mess of them. The widespread liberal belief that the state should remain

neutral between differing conceptions of the good is inconsistently

dropped when it comes to dealings with children—most adults imagine

instead that there is either an objectively appropriate way for children

to behave, learn, and grow up, or that each parent’s subjective and

arbitrary preferences for their children’s conduct should be given force

despite also thinking that even a democratically elected state should

not impose its beliefs of how to live one’s life on its citizenry

When children deviate from adult expectations, from the idealized

abstracted version of what a child is, it can cause cognitive

dissonance: the problem is felt to be with the child and not with the

idea of what a child should be and how children should act. To find an

example of this we need look no further than the way adults react with

horror to children’s use of foul language when the same language used by

an adult would leave them unfazed. Just as children’s apparent

capabilities and behaviors are limited by societal constraints, societal

views of children and the impressions they make on adults are similarly

informed by the social conventions that affect how adults think about

children. This is all the more reason to be skeptical of our own

intuitions about what children are capable of. Recent research strongly

suggests that older adults actually prefer reading articles that seem to

confirm inferior traits in young people. One way this could be explained

is that people in a position of privilege find it affirming and

convenient when they receive information that seems to confirm that

their privilege is natural and not arbitrary.

Parenting Is a Conflict of Interest, by Kathleen Nicole O’Neal

Since becoming involved with youth liberation, I have encountered an

attitude from a number of parents that has consistently left me baffled.

They have expressed this attitude in a variety of ways that probably

sounded like fine rhetoric to the person making the statements but which

has consistently struck me as either disingenuous or betraying a deep

lack of understanding of what youth liberation is really about.

Here is a sampling of the sort of statements to which I refer: “As a

parent I am on the frontlines of advocating for children while you are

dealing with theory.” (This might be less disingenuous coming from

someone that attempts to put some sort of youth autonomy-centered

philosophy at the core of their parenting, but alas this person was not

such a parent.) “As a parent, I can speak to my child’s need for

boundaries and discipline.” “You’ll feel differently when you are a

parent.” These statements are not only a prime example of the

authoritarian impulses of the people making them, they are also patently

absurd upon reflection. This is because parenting is not a qualification

for discussing the rights of youth, it is a conflict of interest.

One is often seen as bolstering his case when he takes a stand despite

having interests to the contrary. This is why the millionaire that

supports higher income tax rates, the poor person that doesn’t believe

in government assistance for people like himself, the white person

speaking out in favor of affirmative action programs for racial

minorities, and the person of color who opposes affirmative action

programs tend to be seen as either a.) lacking a true appreciation of

their own self-interests or b.) acting from a higher and more noble set

of values than immediate self-interest but never as c.) deeply corrupted

by their own interests.

There are also individuals who come to make a judgment about a situation

as a more or less neutral party with nothing that she personally stands

to gain or lose depending on the outcome of the situation. We think of

the ideal judge and jury in a court case as having interests of this

type. Their very neutrality can bolster their claims about a situation.

Parents advocating for their “right” to arbitrarily punish their

children and control their lives are not taking either type of stand.

They are not taking a stand that goes against their self-interests and

they are not coming to a decision about their values from a place of

neutrality. Guardianship and minority give parents power at the expense

of their children. There is therefore nothing especially noble or wise

about parents arguing for the maintenance of these institutions in their

current form - it is simply one example among many of powerful people

attempting to protect their interests at the expense of those they have

power over. Saying “As a parent I know what is best for my child” is no

more noble than saying “As a slave owner I know that emancipation

doesn’t suit the Negro” or “As a logging executive I know that we don’t

need environmental regulation.” Even if the statements were valid, we

would be right to be highly suspect about the motives of the person

making the claim.

When we hear someone speaking of his or her role as a parent as a

justification for beliefs about youth that many youth themselves would

likely find oppressive or even abusive we should never accept that as

good enough and we should never defer to their judgment on those grounds

alone. If anything, that person’s status as a parent should make us more

suspect about his or her motives for supporting youth oppression. When

discussing youth liberation, parenting is not a qualification. It is a

conflict of interest. It is important that no one ever trick us into

thinking of the position of a parent as necessarily pro-youth or even

neutral. We cannot be bullied into silence by those whose class position

vis a vis youth betrays their true motives for advocating for their

continued oppression.

Cheating Is a Moral Imperative, by Cevin Soling

You have been kidnapped and dragged off to a remote location where your

abductors have tied you to a chair. One of your captors is seated in

front of you. He holds up ten flash cards and informs you that he is

going to ask you a series of questions and the answers are printed on

the backs of the cards. He assures you that once he has finished asking

these questions, you will be released. There is a catch, though. For

every question you get wrong, he will signal his accomplice to cut off

one of your fingers. As he begins to read the first question, you notice

there is a mirror on the opposite wall where you can see the reflection

of the text on the card. Because you have been taught that cheating is

dishonest, you interrupt your kidnapper and let him know that you are

able to read the card and that he must conceal them better so that you

cannot inadvertently cheat. He adjusts himself accordingly and proceeds

to ask you a series of dry and uninspired questions on topics that hold

no interest for you, while his accomplice menacingly holds out a set of

cutting pliers.

While cheating is technically wrong, everyone should cringe at this

conception of morality because it fails to account for context. In this

example, cheating is not only justified, it is necessary because it aids

a helpless victim who has been involuntarily subjected to unreasonable

conditions. Unfortunately, this kind of clarity is absent when it comes

to compulsory education.

One of the most salient features of all public schools is the importance

of grades. Because grades are the currency and sole commodity of

schools, they are used both to motivate and punish. They are a major

component of a student’s portfolio and have the potential to impact

their future. Educators might try to stress the value of “learning” over

grades, but that is a complete farce. When learning is not

commensurately represented by grades, students rightly feel cheated by

the system and become apathetic. To insist on valuing learning over

grades is offensively disingenuous and hypocritical. It is akin to

telling workers at McDonald’s that they should care more about doing

their job than their salary

Students have no input regarding how or what they learn, and they are

alienated from the work they do at school. Except for a few rare

assignments, students are not inspired by their work, and any personal

attachment they could have is undermined by the fact that they must

compromise their efforts to meet the demands and expectations of the

person who grades their work.

It’s important to bear in mind that students prepare for tests with the

intention that they will retain the material just long enough to take

the test and then forget most of what they learned soon afterwards. This

completely undermines the purpose and value of testing. Advocates of

testing who denigrate cheating conveniently fail to acknowledge this.

Testing demands that students view knowledge as a disposable commodity

that is only relevant when it is tested. This contributes to the process

of devaluing education.

The benefits of cheating are obvious – improved grades in an environment

where failure is not an opportunity for learning, but rather a badge of

shame. When students do poorly on a test, there is no reason for

students to review their responses because they will likely never be

tested on the same thing ever again. The test itself is largely

arbitrary and often not meaningful. Organizations such as FairTest are

devoted to sharing research that exposes the problems of bad testing

practices.

The main arguments against cheating in school are that it is unethical,

promotes bad habits, and impacts self-esteem through the attainment of

an unearned reward. None of these concerns are even remotely valid

because none consider the environment. Children are routinely rounded up

and forcibly placed in an institution where they are subjected to a

hierarchy that places them at the bottom. Like the hostage, they are

held captive even if they are not physically bound. They are deprived of

any power over their own lives, including the ability to pursue their

interests, and are subjected to a barrage of tests that have

consequences for each wrong answer.

Maintaining ethics is part of an unwritten contract of being a willing

participant in a community. Students placed in school against their will

and routinely disrespected have no obligation to adhere to the ethical

codes of their oppressors. Cheating is an act of resistance, and

resistance against oppressive powers should be encouraged and

celebrated, rather than deemed a “bad habit” or an unethical act. The

concern regarding self-esteem that is highlighted by The Child Study

Center as promoting the “worst damage,” lacks any scientific support

whatsoever.

If students feel bad for cheating, it is because the environment has

created a set of conditions where cheating is necessary and justifiable.

For this same reason, many students are proud that they cheat. Cheating

often requires creativity in terms of execution as well as ingenuity to

avoid being caught. It also serves as a statement of disdain against an

arbitrary and repressive institution. For these reasons, cheating can be

a source for pride that boosts self-esteem. Given this construct,

cheating is not simply something many students do; it is something all

students in compulsory schools should do. Cheating is a moral

imperative.

Punishing students for cheating is completely misguided. People should

be most concerned about the student who does not cheat. They are the

ones who appear to have internalized their oppression and might lack the

necessary skills to rally and lobby against abuses of power that are

perpetrated by governing bodies. Cheating should be recognized as the

necessary and logical outcome of an arbitrary and oppressive

institution. Punishing students who cheat is yet another abuse of

autocratic power. In a healthy society, people ridicule and shame those

who force children to endure the kind of environment that demands they

must cheat.

Excerpt from Undoing the School-to-Prison Pipeline, by Damien

Sojoyner

The analytical construction of the STPP provides an easy and accessible

narrative pertaining to prisons and public education. In general, the

STPP argument states that schools unfairly discipline non-white youth,

particularly Black youth, when compared to students of other races.

Studies demonstrate that Black students have higher rates of

suspensions, detentions, and expulsions than their peers (Wald & Losen,

2003). Further, there is increasing evidence that Black students within

the same schools are disproportionally given more severe forms of

discipline than their white peers for the exact same offenses (Jackson,

2012). The results of these forms of punishment often lead to Black

students either being pushed out of school or arrested on campus. Hence,

school discipline policies and legal constructs serve to funnel Black

youth through the STPP.

The history of STPP research and its associated campaign is complicated

by its development in the midst of anti-prison movements across the

United States. While decades-long organizing efforts by the likes of

Critical Resistance, A New Way of Life, and the Southern California

Library have explicit ties to historic, economic, political, and social

projects that aim to radically alter society through the abolishment of

prisons, the STPP discourse is not invested in the same goal. Further,

the STPP is framed ahistorically, often missing critical racial, class,

gendered, and sexed analyses that are needed to understand the root

causes, including the development of education malaise and subsequent

expansion of prisons within the United States. In this manner, the STPP

discourse cannot begin to address a central theme and line of inquiry

posed by Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2007) that is key to any analysis of

prisons:

This book is about the phenomenal growth of California’s state prison

since 1982, it asks how, why, where, and to what effect one of the

planet’s richest and most diverse political economies has organized and

executed a prison-building and filling plan that government analysts

have called ‘the biggest…in the history of the world.’ (p. 5)

While community organizations across the country have been fighting to

identify and eradicate the multilayered connections between the nation’s

schools and prisons, this has not been the articulated aims of the STPP

discourse. For example, the central document that laid the groundwork

for the discursive framing of the STPP, Deconstructing the

School-to-Prison Pipeline (Wald & Losen, 2003), details a funneling

mechanism that transfers minoritized youth from schools to prisons but

neglects to interrogate the coalescence of schools and prisons including

the political, economic, racial, gendered, and sexed complexities that

undergird both of their foundations. This narrow understanding of the

relationship between schools and prisons has become increasingly

popularized within the past decade. Philanthropic organizations and

national and state government offices have highlighted the pipeline as a

reformist attempt to assuage the demands of community and neighborhood

organizing.The STPP discourse has not only been used by government

officials to describe the relationship between schools and prisons, it

has also been repackaged as a non-threatening, ubiquitous, rhetorical

device for community organizers.

This disturbing trend follows in an eerily similar path as the

development of the “Schools not Jails” campaign during the late 1990s.

As argued by Camille Acey (2000), the Schools not Jails movement

undercut the radical and valid critique that students and community

members had regarding the function of school in the United States.

According to Acey (2000):

The slogan “education not incarceration” grew out of the link between

university student anti-Proposition 209 activism and grass-roots high

school student activism. In the mid- to late 1990s, a number of student

walkouts and protests were led throughout the state of California. The

main emphasis of university students was on increasing access to the

university for poor, working-class communities of color and promoting

more relevant curricula. High school students from those communities

voiced concerns over insufficient educational resources, declining

economic opportunity, and the growing criminalization of their

generation. Often, many of the organizations came together to develop

more comprehensive, radical critiques of these issues and strategies for

political education. Though it is often believed that SNJ [Schools not

Jails] is a variation on “education not incarceration,” I would argue

that that it is a corruption. (p. 208)

In recent years, the co-optation of the STPP discourse has shifted the

conversation away from key historical issues that constituted the

generative core of radical community organizing. Over the past ten

years, conferences and workshops have convened non- profit

organizations, academic scholars, philanthropic foundations, and

legislative bodies to analyze causes and solutions to the STPP. To date,

the primary answer to the STPP has been to focus on student behavior and

policy transformation; that is, the response has been to focus on the

way that discipline policies are levied out based upon racialized

conceptualizations of student behavior (Kim, Losen, & Hewitt, 2010). An

underlying logic of these solutions is that by altering behaviors and

certain policies, students will no longer be pushed out or arrested.

Subsequently, these strategies would help to greatly reduce students’

chances of being sent to prison.

While there is general agreement that Black students are unfairly

disciplined within the realm of public education and that predominately

Black schools are mired in a labyrinth of policing procedures, I argue

that the STPP framework provides an overdetermined, analytic model and

an undertheorized solution set to address issues that are both

historical in nature and extremely complex. Specifically, the STPP is a

concept that is predicated upon an analysis of power that follows an arc

whereby the supposed beholders of power have complete control of the

“other”—Black youth. Similar to Cedric Robinson’s (2007) critique of

Foucault’s analysis of power, the same argument can be made with respect

to the STPP. Specifically, Robinson (2007) states:

It is as if systems of power never encounter the stranger, or that

strangers can be seamlessly abducted into a system of oppression. In our

own interrogations this amounts to the presumption that the exposing of

the invention of race subjects is a sufficient method for recognizing

and explaining difference. (p. xii)

The glaring problem with the STPP’s framework is that it never accounts

for the possibility that the structure of public education is responding

to the actions taken by Black students that are perceived to threaten

the status quo. In this regard, the criminalization of Black youth is

not only intentional, but it is in response to direct agitation on the

part of Black people. Thus, strategies to address the STPP that focus on

shifting behaviors serve to legitimate the idea that disciplining

student behavior is necessary, as long as the mechanisms do not push

students out of school or entail arrests.

While the STPP framework may challenge the basic tenant that the meting

out of discipline is disproportional, it fails to challenge the ethos of

anti-Blackness as foundational to the formation and enactment of school

discipline. Through a brief cull of the annals of contemporary history,

which the STPP framework completely disregards, I will demonstrate that

the modes of current school discipline (e.g., policing and expulsions)

have developed in an attempt to suppress assertions of Black culture,

Black autonomy, and Black liberation movements within schools. Very

simply, the attention to reforming student behavior belies the

complicity of state officials, private capital, and philanthropic

organizations to undermine efforts by Black communities to dictate the

parameters of Black education.

Recognizing that historical processes stretching back over two centuries

account for the education of Black people in the United States, the

basis of support for my argumentation rests on evidence amassed between

the 1940s and 1970s in Southern California. This time period was of

great significance as it marked a mass influx of Black migrants from the

U.S. South to California. Moreover, Los Angeles is important during this

moment as the site where intense violence was enacted upon Black

communal organizations that advocated for social change (Widener, 2010).

It was also during this time period in Los Angeles that education was a

hotly contested area in terms of the terrain of ideological governance.

That is, while Black communities in Los Angeles conceptualized and used

public education as a space to develop alternative models of cultural

expression and organizing, city officials, planners, and private capital

lobbied for and responded with brute force and policy tactics to

undermine liberation movements of Black Angelinos. Looking through two

important documents—the Welfare Planning Council’s report on “Youth

Problems and Needs in the South Central Area” (WPC, 1961) and the

“Police in Government” course manual taught by officers within the Los

Angeles Police Department (LAPD) (Los Angeles Police Department, 1974)

in predominately Black high schools—we achieve a nuanced understanding

of the complex relationship among Black communities, city leaders, and

public education.

In addition to the influx of Black migrants and the level of violence

enacted upon Black communal organizations in Los Angeles during this

time period, Southern California (and Los Angeles in particular) is a

critical site to examine because over the last 50 years, it has become

the region of choice in regards to the testing and development of models

that foster enclosure linkages between education and prisons. Ranging

from the highly marketed anti-drug “D.A.R.E” program to truancy tickets

that mandate arrests and carry exorbitant fines, policy makers in

Southern California have been at the cutting edge of creating policy and

perfecting extralegal measures to ensure the subjugation of Black

education.4 While these programs have been exported nationwide and

lauded as models of public safety and/or crime prevention, it is

necessary to understand the social and political context from which they

developed. It is only then that we can refine our analysis beyond

seductive, rhetorical devices and empty reformist concessions such as

the STPP. Moreover, understanding the social and political context

enables us to begin the “heavy lifting” of developing concrete

strategies that explore the multifaceted nature of education and re-root

movements for social change back to Black communities.

Anarchism and Youth Liberation, by Marc Silverstein

Children in today’s society are uniquely oppressed, but for the most

part their oppression goes unnoticed even by people who consider

themselves progressives or radicals. The fact that the relations between

children and adults are based on inequality and compulsion is considered

a separate issue from oppressions based on race, gender or sexual

orientation, because it is considered somehow natural. Children are seen

as incapable of making decisions for themselves and running their own

affairs, due to their supposed lack of experience and immaturity, and

therefore it is considered legitimate for adults to exercise some kind

of authority over them. Anarchism, which is based on the principles of

individual sovereignty, non-coercion, free association and mutual aid,

can play an important role in helping to formulate an anti-authoritarian

theory of parenting, education and child-rearing, and to begin the

process of liberating children from an oppressive society.

The first kind of authority that children face while growing up is that

of their parents. Parents have legal guardianship over their children

from the moment they are born until they turn 18. Most parents hold an

authoritarian and hierarchical view of their relation to their children.

They see their kids as their property, who are to be nurtured,

protected, kept in line, restrained, disciplined, rewarded or punished

as the parents see fit. Anarchists would oppose this conception of the

child, since children are not seen as autonomous individuals in their

own right, but mere appendages of their parents. Mikhail Bakunin, the

Russian anarchist, put it succintly: “Children do not constitute

anyone’s property: they are neither the property of the parents nor even

of society. They belong only to their own future freedom.”

Some parents use the justification that they are “over-protective” or

they “care about their children too much” to excuse the stifling

atmosphere of the nuclear family. It is with the nuclear family that

gender roles are created and re-inforced, and where authoritarian

ideologies are passed down to the next generation. Neurotic and

anti-social personality traits are also produced in children as a

consequence of the nuclear family’s puritanical suppression of

sexuality. Oftentimes, parents will force their children to follow their

particular religion, i.e. Judaism, Christianity, etc. or political

affiliation, i.e. Republican, Democrat, etc. In the Jewish religion,

boys at 13 are usually pressured or outright coerced into having Bar

Mitzvahs, which is the sign of “becoming a man”. Hanukkah and Christmas

are religious celebrations which children are forced to partake in, and

they are not given any opportunity to make up their own mind about their

religious or political beliefs.

Around the age of 5, children are shipped off to schools, or “youth

concentration camps” as anarchist writer Bob Black accurately called

them. In these institutions children are monitored closely by their

teachers, who make sure to report any kind of “suspicious” behavior. The

purpose of school is to thwart any signs of free-thought or

individuality, by forms of subtle or not-so-subtle coercion. If children

“misbehave”, they are punished by being sent to the office, detention,

suspension, expulsion, or bad grades. In most private middle and high

schools, and in a growing number of public schools, there is a dress

code that children have to follow. Sometimes they are even forced to

tuck in their shirts or wear a belt. Tattoos, dyed hair, piercings and

other attempts to create an individual identity are often met with the

fierce hostility of principals and administrators.

The relation of the administration to the students is almost exactly

like that of a boss to his workers. He owns the institution, he sets the

“standards of conduct”, and tries to create a “productive work

environment”. It is not considered a good idea to question those in

authority, and the anger of the students are channeled into acceptable

forms such as student government or the official student union, which

are similar to modern AFL-CIO unions in the workplace. Student

government may call for minor reforms, but in no way calls into question

the very existence of schools, or the possibility of abolishing coercion

altogether, which the anarchist critique calls for.

It is also quite interesting how much schools and prisons have in common

with each other. In both prisons and schools, the following criteria

apply: an authoritarian structure, dress code, pass needed for going

from one part of the facility to another, emphasis on silence and order,

negative reinforcement, emphasis on behavior, extrinsic reward system,

loss of individual autonomy, abdridged freedoms, and little

participation in decision making.

This begs the question: what can children do to fight back against the

particular forms of oppression they face in their daily lives? The most

important thing is to create a subversive atmosphere in the home,

school, and workplace (high-school students are often forced to work in

shitty, low-paying jobs like McDonalds). Let other young people know how

you feel about parental coercion or about how you are treated by adults.

Class consciousness is essential. Children need to recognize that they

are a uniquely oppressed class vis a vis the oppressing class which

dictates the conditions of their existence. To paraphrase the Preamble

to the IWW Constitution, the oppressed class and the oppressing class

have nothing in common.

Disobedience can be expressed small ways (kind of like sabotage in the

workplace) by refusing to pledge allegiance, to participate in prayer

(in religious schools), or by choosing to write school essays on, for

example, Youth Revolt Throughout History, Emma Goldman, or the case of

Katie Sierra (a 15-year old anarchist suspended from school for wearing

homemade anti-war shirts and for trying to start up an anarchist club)

and deliver them in front of class. Educate yourself outside of school

by talking with others, reading, and sharing your ideas and experiences.

You can make flyers and distribute them or paste them up around the

school. You can start up a zine by yourself or with others, and

distribute it at school. High-school general strikes or Reclaim the

Streets can also be planned; even if they are over seemingly reformist

issues (curfew, uniforms, etc.), they have the possibility of

radicalizing more and more students.

There are many creative possibilities; for instance, a group of

anarchists close to where I live took a sign from a kennel that said

“Obedience Training” and unfurled it over a local high school. To the

extent that such things are successful, parents and administrators must

feel like they can not get away with stuff that they could get away with

before, that they are being closely watched and monitored by the

children they formerly oppressed, that they are slowly losing their grip

of power and authority over youth, and that youth are no longer an

amorphous mass of docile sheep, but class conscious, intelligent,

committed, and organized youth, who are prepared to take their lives

into their own hands and to abolish all masters once and for all.

Anarchism has a lot to offer youth liberation. Its basic principles of

anti-authoritarianism and non-coercion are powerful weapons in the

arsenal to free children from their state of slavery and bondage.

Anarchism also offers youth liberation the insight that it cannot be

content with just abolishing parental coercion, it must also create

liberatory alternatives. This is an example of the revolutionary dual

power strategy, where the new society is created out of the shell of the

old. Contrary to the official view, education does not equal schooling,

and kids can create a whole self-organized infrastructure of

counter-institutions for learning, growing, and developing themselves –

on a basis of full equality and freedom. Genuinely “free skools” can be

created, where classes are strictly voluntary, and children can choose

to study a particular subject with others, children or adults, who

happen to be an authority on the topic. As Colin Ward put it in his book

Anarchy in Action, they will be “schools no longer” but popular

laboratories of liberation.