An essay written for Harvey Milk Day

This year was the first official <a href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvey_Milk_Day  in California”> Harvey Milk Day</a> in California, on May 22.  On that same day, <a href=”http://www.mtbs.com/”&gt; Modern Times Bookstore</a> hosted a radical parenting reading.  I wrote the following essay to read at that event.

My kid’s school, every Friday, has an all school assembly.  Different classes take turns running it, and it’s always awesome.  Different performing skills are showcased, and it’s amazing to have kindergarten through 8^th grade all in one room.  Yesterday, as a result of a request from our school’s diversity committee, there was going to be some programming about Harvey Milk day.  How cool, right?  When it came to it, though, what that consisted of was an announcement that May 22 was Harvey Milk Day and that there were activites throughout the city, though none were specified.  No discussion of who Harvey Milk was, why there was a day in his honor, or why it was important to our school community.  So, one step in the right direction but so much work still to do, but when contrasted with the school district in Bakersfield which banned observance of Harvey Milk day in the schools, not so very terrible.

The right wing knows that  schools are a central place of struggle.  They used kids to scare people into supporting Prop 8.  In fact, my child’s class took a field trip to throw flowers at her teacher’s wedding at city hall, and the media came, and the homophobes used it as a campaign tool to help pass prop 8.

Back in 1978, the right wing used schools as the site of a huge attack against gay rights with the prop 6, aka the Briggs initiative, which would have made it illegal for gay people or people who supported gay rights to be teachers in California.  One of the many legacies that Harvey Milk left us was the way that he confronted that campaign head on, without hiding his sexuality and without apology.  He went head to head with John Briggs in debates around the state, and his efforts were instrumental in defeating that initiative.  Opponents of prop 8, unfortunately, did not follow his example, with disastrous results.  Watching the documentary The times of Harvey Milk is a great way to learn about this and generally more about how Harvey Milk’s politics were very broad, in fact, his approach was very much about collective liberation.

So, if schools are a key site of struggle, how do we engage?

Recently I’ve made a choice that definitely bumps hard against my anarchism; as a result of my involvement in my kid’s school, I have decided to run for elected office.   Nothing too big, just the BOD of my kid’s school, but standing for an election is still kind of a crazy step for a long term self identified anarchist like myself.

My kid’s school is a public charter, which means that it’s free to attend, it gets a certain amount of public funds and has open enrollment where kids are chosen by lottery (just like the district), with the difference that no one gets assigned to this school, kids are only entered in the lottery if you apply.  The other significant difference is that although charter schools are accountable to state standards, there is a lot of autonomy around how the school approaches curriculum, and also, instead of being run by the district, the school is run by a board of directors who are all parents and/or staff at the school, and who are elected by the school community: one vote per kid or employee.

Charter schools are tricky.  In their worse application, as in New Orleans or Washington DC, they are used to decimate public education and to destroy teacher’s unions, because almost no charter schools are unionized.  On the other hand, in their best application, charter schools create an opportunity to step outside of the increasingly restrictive, test heavy, high stakes approach to education and try different, more creative approaches.  So, in spite of my reservations, we opted to send our kid to a school that is arts integrated and project based, and to make it even better, this school year the teachers voted in a union. Making my kid’s school one of the very few (but proud!!) unionized charter schools in the country.

Our school had a rough year this year, with a lot of strife around an administrative restructuring process, and it’s hard to explain why having such a hard year made me finally step up to running for the board, something I’ve actively resisted the two previous years.  But here I am, an anarchist running for an elected position.  Not that being an anarchist is part of my platform, noooo.

But the things that I believe I bring to the work, if I do get elected, are things I gained through years of engagement in radical political space: an analysis of leadership and accountability, an ability and desire to think strategically, calmness, and an ability to commit to long term, unpaid volunteer work.

A seat on the board of directors is a two year commitment.  Should I get elected, that means two years of not having a lot of time or capacity to do political work.

Did you see what I just did there?  Do you see the embedded assumption, that this kind of stuff is not political?

Most of my radical political comrades, were you to ask them point blank, would certainly agree that doing work to make a school survive and function is political, that there is social justice value in working in a school community, especially if some of that work incorporates counterhegemonic education, or addresses the equity gap.  But very few elementary schools could ever be called movement space, and as someone who spent years embedded in community that consciously attempted to build revolutionary movement, and recently spent almost a decade in a cadre style organization, shifting focus to working in a school community is lonely alienating work.  My kid’s school is generally progressive, it’s a fairly diverse community in many ways, and there are some really awesome people I can call comrades, but overall it’s a space where getting shit done requires not waving the black flag…or the red flag…every time I step up to say or do something.  It’s a space where a larger analysis of the state of the world is not part of the discussion, and so far as I can tell is not informing the discussion, and it’s not always easy to connect the work I do in that space to building a movement for collective liberation, which is something I am committed to.

But you know, it’s where my kid spends 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, 10 months a year.  It’s a place that needs a lot of energy and focus and work, and any energy, focus, and work I put into it affects not only my kid but the whole school community.  And how can I, as someone so inclined toward activism and organizing, not apply that approach and the skills I’ve gained when faced with a strong need in a place where my child, my child, is being educated?

Contemplating this brought something I’ve vaguely been aware of into sharper focus…when was the last time I brought Natasha to a movement event not focused on parenting or kids and there was a kid her age there?    It’s probably been a couple of years.  She used to love to come to events that had childcare, because it was so fun for her, but more recently if there’s childcare it’s my second grader and a bunch of toddlers.  Which is not a critique of the childcare at all.  I am really proud and appreciative that so many organizers in the bay area prioritize providing childcare at radical social justice events in the bay area.  It’s just that I am wondering, where are the parents of school aged kids?

And now I’m thinking, I think they are in the schools.  They’re on the PTA type organizations at their school, they’re fighting with the administration, they’re supporting their teachers, they’re organizing for ethnic studies in the high schools (and by the way, how amazing it that, that the San Francisco school board approved an ethnic studies pilot program in high school?  Big props to POWER, Coleman Youth Advocates, and the other organizations that made that happen!).  They’re supporting their kids who have learning disabilities or social problems, they’re fundraising for arts programs or Physical education, they’re advocating for their kids in the face of racial or patriarchal bigotry, they’re braving the storms of puberty, they’re engaging with other parents on all kinds of issues.

And I bet, like me, a lot of these folks, who may have been very deeply involved in social change work before they became parents, have also internalized this message that this isn’t the real work, this is marginal somehow.

For me this brings up a few different things.  One is that I feel like there’s got to be a way for those of us who for whatever reason are putting our activist and organizing energy into spaces that aren’t commonly recognized as movement spaces to be able to still be connected to the overall movement.  This is important because access to the current analysis and strategies of movement building work can make our work much stronger and more relevant, and in the other direction, those of us in non movement spaces have information about what’s going down and how people are reacting and coping that can inform movement building work.

I also have to struggle not to feel defensive, as though I need to somehow justify my reduced appearance on the street or at meetings.   I know that the work I do in the school is invisible to many of the people I’ve worked with over the years, and the loss of connection and loss of community that comes with that is hard and sad.

The other thing for me is that I spent years being vaguely dissatisfied with how little my political work brought me into interaction with people who weren’t politically active.  Part of that was about the type of organizing I did; for years I focused on solidarity work and anti-racist work within the white activist community.  Part of it, too, may have been about being alienated from the mainstream and losing track of how to communicate outside of my own political and sub cultural sphere.  But just as some of my comrades from rural areas are looking to go back to where they came from and bring their political skills, analysis, and commitments with them, I see engagement in the schools as a way to do that as well, even if much of what we do in schools is not overtly or obviously radical or political.

When our school was going through hard times this year, I saw so many places where the analysis of leadership coming out of the collective liberation oriented sector of the anarchist movement, or our analysis of accountability, could have been so, so useful.  So many places where the kind of basic consciousness about how your word and actions might be interpreted – that solidarity activists need to be hyper conscious of – could have been so useful.  And overall and ongoing, a thoughtful, mature, and strategic analysis of power, and the difference between power over and power with, is something that any community with many active and impassioned volunteers could benefit from.

So when it comes down to it, where I get identity crisis feelings about running for the board of my kid’s school is not so much about  the contradictions between being an anarchist and asking people to vote for me as it is about  worrying about devoting so much of my activist and organizing energy to work in the school. Especially right at this moment, when so many of my friends and comrades are preparing to head to Arizona to confront the utter bullshit racial profiling nationalist crap going on there.  But for perspective, I think about  back in January of 2009, when Israel was bombing the hell out of Gaza for days and days and days.  Because I was open about how I felt about that, I ended up having deep conversations with two friends, both of them moms of my kid’s classmates, who were both raised to be unquestioning Zionists and rarely encountered any information to make them question.  The conversations were really good, and one of those people ended up joining Jewish Voice for Peace.  So putting a large portion of my activist and organizing energy into the school may mean that I am not often able to be on what I have always considered to be the front lines, but working behind the lines, helping more people figure out how to step up is also important work.

And to close with another connection to Harvey Milk, I think his dog shit initiative has lessons for us.  One of his first acts in public office  was to pass an ordinance requiring that dog owners clean up after their dogs or face fines.   Really mundane, daily aggravation kind of stuff, not the kind of thing that you generally see on a politician or community organizers agenda.  But as a result he won the support of a lot of people who then continued to support him as he proposed and passed a landmark gay rights bill in San Francisco.

There’s so much that can be learned from Harvey Milk’s work.  He’s mostly known as a gay hero, and he is that.  He was also a coalition builder, a brilliant strategist, and someone who saw that the liberation of one exploited or oppressed group is tied to the liberation of all exploited and oppressed groups.  It may take a while for his holiday to reach the stature of Cesar Chavez or MLK day, but a broader familiarity of his work and a recognition of his brilliance is a gift for all of us, wether we are working in schools, fighting to protect same sex parented families, or organizing caravans to Arizona.