BROOKLYN, NY — After marking one year of the multiracial antiracist fightback against racist police terror, Kingsborough Community College (KCC) students and faculty continue the struggle in a campus atmosphere of sharpening fascism at the hands of the liberal administration, public safety, and their bootlicking accomplices. However, students, faculty, and Progressive Labor Party (PLP)members in the campus antiracist club, Common Ground, are adapting to the racist administration’s normalization of police surveillance and increased bureaucratic red tape.
PL’ers have contributed to continuing the struggle by deepening old friendships and making new ones. We struggle to push back against our previous limits in the dark night of low class struggle by expanding CHALLENGE newspaper distribution networks. This has kept the politics of multiracial antiracist fightback, internationalism, and communist revolution upfront as we marched through months of difficulty after difficulty!
Mass work tests patience and persistence
We soon learned that KCC’s administration introduced new obstacles for Common Ground this year. The first was cracking down on informational club tabling by requiring that only both registered and “active” clubs could set up tables and distribute literature. In the past, any club could set up an information table and meet interested students before registering or reactivating.
Each semester, new paperwork including election results must be submitted for the club to be “reactivated.” Common Ground’s reactivation process entailed weeks of properly formatted paperwork, collecting signatures, and losing several potential club officers who were either a) barred for being freshmen and/or b) didn’t pass the GPA eligibility requirements. Then came mandatory training meetings with the administration.
Upon reactivation, we met our next obstacle: this year: the administration has declared that informational tabling counts as a club “event,” and therefore requires one month of notice to reserve through an online portal for event registration. On most days the tables are utterly empty, except for the regular military recruiters. (A Marine recruiter/ CHALLENGE reader confessed to us that the administration is very helpful in getting recruiters onto campus.) When Common Ground students and faculty agreed on a tabling schedule and requested it, we were denied, and given alternative days and times we were unable to meet!
As a final insult, our assigned general meeting room’s newly installed door doesn’t open with the student keys. Opening it requires contacting Public Safety officers with the master keys each time, who often linger by the door. At the start of one recent meeting, a sergeant entered to wipe a stain off a table “to avoid the paperwork” of requesting custodial staff to do it.
The racism of requirements
The ease of allowing military recruiters on campus contrasts with the technical difficulty of getting student clubs started here. KCC is a two-year, predominantly Black, Muslim, Latin, and Asian immigrant campus where over 74 percent of students receive income-based Pell Grants, and 99 percent receive some type of city or state financial aid (NCES, 2021-2). Since the rules have tightened, the number of active clubs has dropped from over 130 at the last available count about a decade ago, to less than 30 today.
Brooklyn College, also in CUNY and not far from KCC, is a four-year campus with a mostly white student body. Their administration does not bar freshmen officers or demand as many club requirements, including a minimum GPA. Many of the campus’ 140 registered clubs table around campus grounds, distribute literature, and post it on various public bulletin boards. Unlike KCC’s requirements for stamped Student Life pre-approval on posted flyers, many of the various political flyers found posted around Brooklyn College during a recent visit had no such stamp.
Overcome all hardships and STRUGGLE!
Difficult objective circumstances never excuse us from failing to organize and fight back. During this semester’s club fair, our vibrant multiracial crew attracted the most student interest, as per usual. When the fascist Israeli bosses launched a genocide against the workers of Gaza, we defied the prohibition on tabling, distributed hundreds of leaflets, and made enthusiastic new contacts. We organized Latin America - Palestine solidarity through a Palestinian former student who spoke at a Brooklyn mass organization (see previous CHALLENGE).
Members of the club also helped organize a contingent of KCC students for the solidarity with Gaza demonstrations in Washington, DC, continuing our practice of building rapid responses to racism, and one of these students attended PLP’s fall student conference. racism, and one of these students attended PLP’s fall student conference.
We continue ongoing sharp political discussions analyzing how it can be that the heads of KCC’s entire administrative Hydra are liberal, Black administrators; many are women. Despite coming from historically oppressed groups, so many of them not only continue to uphold racism but cynically draw on this history of oppression as part of their identity. Audaciously, they claim to have the students’ best interests at heart, while claiming that antiracists and PL’ers in Common Ground don’t.
Yes, the obstacles presented real challenges to reaching masses of students – but these attacks mean we’re hurting the bosses, and each advance weakens them further. The central head of this Hydra is capitalism, and the administration won’t let us organize without a fight. This fact exposes both illusion and reality: that liberal, Black-led institutions under the capitalist state can never be antiracist, and that the only solution out of this racist, sexist, genocidal imperialist hellscape is communist revolution. JOIN US!