VIVA LA REVOLUCION!

So today I was in a meeting, at my youth-organization, Sistas and Brothas United. We broke into different groups at one point, to discuss what type of organizing work we’d like to do in our schools. All of the youth in the room were leaders in their own right, with experience in organizing and building power among young people. We are young people of color, creating movements in our high schools that will sustain themselves with youth leadership and the desire to escape marginalization. 

There happened to be 3 college students from a nearby university, and they were going to be interns whose job is to support us in organizing work. When I joined the students from my school in the part of the room we were meeting in, he sat down with us. At first, I didn’t think much of it…but literally ten seconds later he begins dominating the meeting. Like a typical white male. 

He began by telling everyone to sit and to introduce ourselves. That irked me a little, but it was understandable at least. Then, we proceeded to talk about the work we had gotten done in our school over the last few weeks (planning a Gay Straight Alliance) when suddenly he begins trying to explain to us how we should deal with authority when it came to school administrations and stuff. The way he spoke, you would’ve thought the youth didn’t know jack fucking squat about organizing or dealing with authority. I’m disappointed in myself for not telling him to his face “We’re young people of color, we’ve been learning how to deal with [white] authority for 500 years.” Continuing in his condescending manner and with that superiority complex, he began to waste alot of the time we had left, and eventually we ignored him and continued our conversation. However, 2 of my friends in the group, he had taken them off into a whole other conversation when it was important for them to be a part of our discussion. 

Later, those 2 friends were telling me how annoyed they were that he had taken them away from being in the discussion, and how most of the stuff he had been saying was complete shit. He was arrogant but didn’t know shit about organizing in our communities. His very presence created a weird power dynamic that made it hard to stand up to him as he colonized our meeting. But that’s what we have to destroy. We have to teach these devils that if they’re going to be in our spaces, to “support” our work, then they need to be respectful of our space and of us as young leaders and people of color. We need to be able to tell them that to their faces, or else they’re going to continue to dominate our spaces and hinder progression in our movements. The most iniquitous thing we can do is what I did—remain silent. If we remain silent in any instance of colonization, then everything that so many people fought and died for in the past is going to waste. 

Long live the Revolution!