Learning to fight for students
The pandemic has provided educators with opportunities to build some working-class muscles.
I teach at a high school with a 97 percent Black and Latin immigrant population. While our Black principal prides herself in being pro-student, she leads racist attacks against students with the highest needs.
Just last week, my 14-year-old advisee McKay—a young man with special needs—ran away from home and the principal ordered us to stay out of it. “Do not get involved. That’s not your job,” she said.
This is the same principal that ordered us not to get involved when our student Malcolm, also special needs, was brutalized by the cops during a demonstration against the murder of George Floyd and others in May.
When the school bosses prioritize paperwork and liabilities over the safety of students, they are participating in the systemic pushing out and alienation of Black working-class teens, especially young men. Teachers must push the boundaries of what is “part of our job.” Supporting our students and building student-parent-educator unity is part of our job. Exposing the racist practice of expendability is part of our job.
Many people at work don’t see it that way but little actions add up. So whether it’s fighting to give students more opportunities to meet with teachers for office hours or building a student newspaper or building in antiracism and the fight against police terror into the curriculum, we are slowly but surely learning to stick our necks out for students.
This work is inherently antiracist and through these tiny actions, we see how the system routinely fails our students and then blames them for failing. That is infuriating. And then, a teen in class yesterday said, “we don’t need cops in our schools because students feel scared and they should listen to us because it’s our experience and our life.” That is cause for optimism.
As for McKay, he is still out there in 31 degree weather. I will keep calling. If he isn’t living proof of why we need to kill capitalism, I don’t know what is.
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Communism is anti-capitalist vaccine
Nine of ten people in poorer countries will not get a Covid-19 vaccine until 2022 and hundreds of millions will never get it and die because vaccine companies have intellectual property rights (IPR). Even though tax payers have mostly paid for their research, IPR allows these companies to produce only enough vaccines that rich countries have contracted to pay for. All current vaccine supply has already been bought up and will be distributed to serve profit and political needs. Six of the wealthiest nations have already refused to suspend their IPR, which would allow the world’s vaccine companies to copy and produce a timely and affordable people’s vaccine that could save the lives of billions worldwide.
It has been said that capitalists would impose IPR on the use of the sun if they could. is the contradiction between them and communists who fight to use production for people’s needs and an end to profits, inequality and exploitation. Vaccines like all properties need to be owned and shared by all peoples if only because no country is safe until all are safe. And vaccines without masks and distancing won’t stop vaccinated people with capitalist disregard for others from spreading the disease.
Today we need people to spread the need for collective values and a communist world. It has been said that such people do not just happen, they are born in struggle. Now is the time to join Progressive Labor Party to develop the mental communist vaccine that can destroy the world’s greatest pandemic—capitalism.
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Afghanistan: How U.S. imperialist wars destroyed farmers
NYT, 12/9 — …80-year-old Jamal Khan’s…plot of land was the source of his family’s livelihood — until the American forces arrived…Armored vehicles drove into fields of knee-high corn stalks, claimed about 30 acres that were owned by about as many families and quickly cordoned off the area with barbed wire. This was how Combat Outpost Honaker-Miracle, one of roughly 1,000 military installations the United States and its coalition partners would prop up across Afghanistan….
Mr. Khan is one of countless Afghans whose land has become a casualty of the U.S.-led war and the sprawling military structure born from it…The Americans have left…but Mr. Khan does not have his land back…Not only are Afghans deprived of justice under the American-backed government, but…the U.S. military presence has added to the injustice….Although the Afghan army now occupies his land, Mr. Khan is still required to pay tax on the plot…In Northern Balkh Province, the U.S.-led coalition forces built a base next to the provincial capital’s airport. Amanullah Balkhi…says the installation occupies about 20 acres of his land….
“I have the deed, and…the courts have attested that this is my land,” he said. But the Americans still have the land and they still deny me....[At] a base in Panjwai….about 10 years ago, dozens of coalition vehicles arrived at the small village….getting to work building a new base. They didn’t carve a road…where we came and went — they carved a road for themselves through people’s lands, people’s gardens,” said Fida Muhammad a tribal elder…
“It ruined the irrigation system too….The land dried,” Mr. Muhammad said…. “Many families…went to the city for daily labor….” When a base was transferred to Afghan control….Afghan commanders…did not care about the local residents’ grievances which they saw as an issue between the farmers and the Americans.
U.S.-British WWII bombings deliberately murdered civilians
NYT Book Review, 11/24—“War” by Margaret MacMillan — The United States and Britain…bombing of Germany and Japan in World War II…deliberately aimed to terrorize civilian populations. In 1945, Americans flying over Tokyo dropped incendiary bombs, a weapon chosen deliberately because so many homes were built of wood; the raid killed as many as 100,000 civilians and left a million homeless….Maj/ Gen. Curtis LeMay…[said] the Japanese were “scorched and boiled and baked to death.” MacMillan notes: “It was no oversight that mass bombings were not included in the Allied indictment of Nazi leaders at the Nuremburg trials.”
Pandemic hit Latin, Black, Asian women the hardest
NYT, 11/13 — …A gender gap in retirement security [combined with] women earn[ing] less than men and…[being] more likely to take time off from work to care for children…[means] interruptions diminish wage growth, retirement savings and Social Security benefits….Women…also outlive men [and]…face higher health care expenses in retirement.
…The pandemic recession is disproportionately damaging [to] women…experts call it a “shecession.” Latina, Black and Asian American women have been hit the hardest….Many entered the pandemic earning less, [and] have experienced higher jobless rates….and many may never become fully employed again…Losses beyond the immediate salary…compound over time in…missed wage growth, retirement savings and Social Security benefits….
…Four times as many women as men dropped out of the labor force in September alone and barely half that number returned…Women earn 82 cents for every dollar earned by men…[and] 49 cents on the dollar in 2015 when measuring earnings of all workers….
The structural problems that women face…translate into problems maintaining their living standards in retirement and raise their risk of falling into poverty…A larger percentage of [women’s]…retirement time is spent needing assistance with their daily living.
Slaveholder Chief InJustices of the Supreme Court
NYT (Book Review), 11/25 — [When] the enslaved Dred Scott brought his first lawsuit for freedom in Missouri, where he was held in bondage,…the Supreme Court hand[ed] down its notorious verdict in 1857. Black people, Chief Justice Roger Taney declared, “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”
...In 1813, when the Supreme Court, under Chief Justice John Marshall…in an appeal brought by Mina Queen, an enslaved woman, it was handing a victory to the slaveholding class — of which Marshall was decidedly a member. Marshall personally held more than 150 people in bondage.
Structures of segregation embedded in daily lives
NYT, 12/1 — “CHANGE”…the letters mark…the St. Louis Hotel & Exchange, where…enslaved people…were once sold,….lingering traces that were hidden in plain sight… “Colored” entrances to movie theaters, or walls built inside restaurants to separate non-white customers….Photographs capture the Black institutions that arose in response to racial segregation…[and] depict the sites where Black people were attacked, killed or abducted….The Ghosts of Segregation. …The small side window at Edd’s Drive-In….was actually a segregated window used in the Jim Crow era to serve Black customers
The locked black double doors aside Seattle’s Moore Theater….was once the “Colored” entrance used by non-white moviegoers to…the theater’s second balcony…Slavery is often referred to as America’s “original sin.” Its demons still haunt in the dorm of segregated housing, education, health care [and] employment…The painted sign for Clark’s Café in Huntington, Ore, which trumpeted “All White HELP,” was destroyed….The Houston Negro Hospital School of Nursing has since been demolished…
These photographs are…more about the people who once populated them….[and are] a testament to the endurance of the racial inequalities…The deaths…of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery, among many other Black Americans, prompted…one of the largest movements in U.S. history. And these pictures prove…the evidence of the structures of segregation — and the ideology of white supremacy — still…[are] embedded in…our day-to-day