BROOKLYN, March 29—In early March the bosses’ media finally reported a year-old wave of anti-Asian violence in a serious way and the antiracist reflexes of dedicated staff at the mostly-Asian Brooklyn Technical High School sprang into action.
The school's equity team organized a schoolwide response which included devoting time in all classes to solidarity lessons and setting up travel groups from Chinese immigrant neighborhoods to the school.
Then came the horrific Atlanta shootings targeting young Asian women. Asian students shared stories of families afraid to leave the house. The week’s lessons and a town hall organized by the sophomore class took on increased urgency. In a promising sign of potential class-consciousness most students who spoke up have resisted the twin poisonous ideas of anti-Black racism (since some attacks on Asian workers have been carried out by Black workers or youth) and reliance on the heightened police protection as a source of safety.
Fighting racism at Brooklyn Tech
A long-festering racist impact of New York City’s worst-in-the-nation system of segregated public schooling is that the student body at the highly selective Brooklyn Technical High School is disproportionately Asian and white, about 85 percent. While 70 percent of the city student body is Black or Latin, the combined presence of Black and Latin students in the student body at Tech hovers around 15 percent.
Across all the city’s magnet high schools The Specialized High Schools Admissions Test has reproduced and worsened these racist results for years (NY Post, 3/19/20), sending the message that Black and Latin students do not belong at the city’s “best” schools. But any school that reproduces such a racist lesson is not a good school.
Since 2015 Black students at Brooklyn Tech have hit back in a series of public (msnbc, 1/16/16) and in-house campaigns to expose racist bullying that is baked into school life at Tech. This reprehensible behavior, exhibited by some staff along with some students, merely reproduces the constant racist broadcast from ‘liberal’ NYC school bosses that the ‘best’ schools cannot be Black or Latin. An increasing proportion of the staff have responded to the student outcry by dedicating themselves to establishing an antiracist tone in school life.
Student’s voices, including sharp criticism of faculty complicity in racism, have come to guide school life more and more. In many schools the ‘equity team’ is an empty vessel. The equity team at Tech has managed to carve a space for itself in the face of an ongoing campaign of administrative harassment of vocal Black and Jewish teachers. It has fought to become the home base of antiracist activity.
Results are incomplete, but in close unity with a long-established and open Proressive Labor Party (PLP) presence, multiracial unity is being strengthened in the class struggle against the NYC bosses’ segregation and its disgusting racist effects. When in-person schooling returns after spring break, staff stand ready to organize commuter groups.
Next stop, May Day!
Anti-Asian violence is nothing new in the U.S. This most recent manifestation has been whipped up in the context of China-bashing trade wars, a Covid-19 blame-game and infrastructure development all designed to plant the seed of support for future war against U.S. imperialism’s chief long-term rival – Chinese imperialism (see editorial, page 2). Beyond Covid-19, the warmongering suggestion that Asians living in the U.S. may be spies for the Chinese ruling class is connected by a bright line back to the fascist internment of the Japanese during World War II.
The international working class has one interest, communism, and one day to gather our forces to express our determination to get there—May Day. Show your solidarity against racist attacks and the future imperialist bloodbath the imperialists have in store for us all by joining Progressive Labor Party for May Day 2021. J
March down Flatbush Avenue, 1pm Saturday May 1. Evening zoom celebration at 6pm.