Summer update: Youth Rally, Prison Strike Solidarity, Creativity Not Control

Strike solidarity newsletter produced by comrades from the Free Us All Coalition

Folks in BOC have been busy recently, and we haven’t gotten a chance to update this blog for a while. I’m gonna post links to a few activities that some of us have been involved with or have been supporting here in Seattle this summer.  Of course we’ve been studying and trying to make sense of the rise and fall of recent movements like Decolonize/ Occupy.  But we’ve also been supporting some of the new organizing that’s been happening.

Comrades in Seattle from a variety of groups and tendencies have been organizing solidarity actions with the California and Green Hill prison hunger strikes, which have now been going for a month.  Please click here to see how you can support the strikers, who are facing a very critical situation right now.

A group of youth or color we know came out to the strike solidarity rally in Seattle.  One of them, Alondra Garcia, did her own hunger strike and wrote this piece about it. The youth then organized their own rally and  un-permitted march here  in Seattle, in the wake of the Zimmerman verdict.  They called for justice for Trayvon Martin, and an end to ICE holds/deportations, (which is currently being debated in the King County Council).  They also acted in solidarity with the prison hunger strikers.  As the link above describes, this rally was militant, youth-lead, and dynamic.  In was a significant departure from the usual Leftist routine of demoralizing rallies, and it inspired a lot of us to keep up the struggle.

I gave this speech at the rally, about student-teacher solidarity.   I also tried to agitate fellow teachers to support this kind of youth organizing (my own coworkers are awesome, and they were very supportive of the youth, but unfortunately we have a long way to go before the majority of teachers see the need for this kind of solidarity).

To promote that kind of perspective, I’ve been updating the Creativity Not Control blog regularly, with writings by youth and with some reflections about teaching and public education.  This blog is a project I’ve been working on with some awesome parents who I met during Occupy; they have been involved in struggles in the Seattle Public Schools for several years.  We share a commitment to fighting white supremacy and to organizing in ways that unite teachers, parents, and students; we want to learn for life, not labor.   We started the blog during the MAP test boycott this spring, to help spread the boycott and to address related issues that were coming up.  We’re hoping more teachers, parents, and students will contribute to it over time.  There has also been an interesting debate in the comments section of this piece about teacher unionism and about whether we should  have schools or not in a communist society.

In the next few days, I’ll also post a link to a new writing project I’ve been working on with comrades from NYC.

I hope everyone’s doing well.   There’s nothing like summer in the Northwest 🙂

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