Collectivity must win over competition Student athletes lead in fight against racism

BROOKLYN, NY, December 15–In the ongoing  struggle to make antiracism primary in the varsity sports at the multi-school John Jay Campus, students took the lead in a virtual forum that drew nearly 100 participants. Organized by parents, teachers, and students, the forum—“Are We One?”—gave students an opportunity to push adults on campus, including members of Progressive Labor Party (PLP), to be self-critical about the athletic program’s integration efforts, which have disappointed a number of Black and Latin student athletes. In their drive to improve those efforts, the students also demanded that antiracism and collectivity—not wins and losses—should be the main measures of a successful season for a sports team.
The leadership of Black youth—the ones most brutally targeted by this racist system–continues to be central to this process. Building antiracist, integrated teams on and off the court is one way to crack the racist divisions that are normalized by the Department of Education (DoE) and the Public Schools Athletic League (PSAL).
Under capitalism, competition is so commonplace that we rarely notice its harmfulness. It fosters selfish individualism and undermines class solidarity. Communists fight for a world where all workers can reach their full potential in body and mind.
Multiracial unity vs. elitism
Armed with a proud history of fightback, the John Jay girls’ volleyball team has been at the crux of the struggle against the racist opportunity gap in youth sports. If anything, these tensions have intensified during the pandemic. In the 2020-2021 school year, most public high school students in New York attended school virtually, and varsity sports programs were suspended. Many of the Black and Latin athletes who’d played on the successful John Jay girls volleyball team the year before had no way to practice or develop their skills. Then, in the fall of 2021, the PSAL integrated a fourth campus school into the John Jay athletic program: the elitist Millennium Brooklyn High School. It also shoehorned the even more elitist Millennium High School from Manhattan into the John Jay program. (In previous years, the two Millennium schools had followed the DoE’s apartheid playbook and formed their own segregated team, though they used John Jay’s facilities.)
In this past fall’s tryouts for girls’ volleyball, the impact of capitalism’s racist inequality was brutally obvious. Players from the two Millennium schools, who are predominantly white or Asian and middle-class, had the advantage of playing for private club teams when public school sports were shut down. For the most part, the Black and Latin players from the other John Jay schools lacked that opportunity—they couldn’t afford the thousands of dollars charged by the private clubs. They were effectively pushed aside by the programs’ merger. The coaches and PL members at John Jay had failed to think ahead about how to support them.  
During the forum, players and their coach painted different pictures of the season. Crediting two Black players for bringing their concerns and ideas to him, the coach acknowledged that his old way of coaching was problematic. He said he recognized that he was caught in a contradiction between fighting for antiracism and playing the girls who’d sharpened their skills on the private club circuit. There were some positive developments over the season. The coaches and athletes worked to strengthen bonds among the players. Some multiracial friendships were formed.  
But on the court, most of the Black and Latin athletes played relatively little during the regular season—and even less in this year’s playoffs, where John Jay lost in the city championship finals. The drive to win—to be “elite”—took precedence over antiracist unity and the entire squad’s development. This error was most hurtful to the Black and Latin players who rarely played. But it also hurt the girls who played the most, because it put them above the team and prevented them from truly uniting with the players on the sideline. It also fed into the elitism and de facto segregation that plagues the John Jay campus, where a racist Millennium assistant principal is notorious for surveilling the stairways and shooing away Black and Latin students off “his” floor, even when they’re trying to see the school nurse.
Students hold the power!
John Jay’s student athletes are powerful. Sometimes the victims of racism feel only rage and frustration, and powerlessness to make a difference—but not these young women. As one of them said, “The administration and PSAL failed Black and Latin children this year. They told them they’d protect them, and they didn’t.” These antiracist organizers have been bold in their demands and leadership to push John Jay’s integration efforts beyond the sports program. Several brave students stepped forward at the forum to expose other racist incidents. When a “Free Palestine” poster was stolen from a club’s “solidarity wall” at Millennium, and then burned on video, the response from the do-nothing principal was to ask the club to add a “Protect Israel” poster to the wall—to defend the Zionist bosses and their own vicious apartheid! When Black students reported that a white student at John Jay Law was posting gutter racist comments on social media, the administration told them not to let “words” hurt them.
But students are fighting back! They rebuked the Law administrators and pointed out that racist words have historically led to racist terror in this nation built on the savagery of slavery. They spoke of their unwillingness to be passive in the face of anti-Black racist state terror, and of how much they’d learned from the millions of protestors who took to the streets after George Floyd was murdered by the racist kkkops. They have distributed a list of demands to advance multiracial unity throughout the campus. Plans are in the works to unite the fightback at Millennium with the rest of John Jay by inviting the protest’s leaders to join the Campus Council, the student government for all four schools.
The main contradiction in capitalist schools is between the students and the education bosses. To smash this rotten system, students must be mobilized to unite with the international working class to destroy the rulers’ state and all of its institutions—to make a communist revolution. For now, our job is to support these students’ reform efforts, to help them organize, and to deepen their understanding of racism and how it can ultimately be defeated.
All workers win with communism
We know that capitalism feeds on racism and will never get rid of it . Only a multiracial fight to smash capitalism can lead us to a new society free of racism, sexism, and exploitation. That system is communism!
The opposite of capitalist competition is communist collectivity, a system that creates winners with no losers. PLP is organizing in more than two dozen countries for communism, drawing inspiration from the first workers’ states in the Soviet Union and China, which promoted mass participation in sports in the spirit of working-class solidarity. The slogan of the Chinese Cultural Revolution said it all: “Friendship first, competition second.”
Communists fight for a world where all workers reach their full potential in body and mind. Fight for communism! Join PLP!