Abstract
In this well designed and deftly executed ethnography of high school students struggling for social justice in contemporary Oakland, California, high schools, Andreana Clay explores the distinct generational challenges facing what she chooses to call ‘the hip-hop generation’ as they attempt to craft organizing strategies appropriate to this moment in history and to the circumstances in which they live. The young people at the centre of Clay’s study inherit a contradictory legacy. They live in a society that proclaims itself to be colour blind, yet everywhere they turn they experience conditions that are colour bound. They live in a society that revels in romantic representations of multi-culturalism, but rejects any real inter-racial sharing of rights and responsibilities. The elected officials who purport to represent them are by and large administrators of austerity rather than champions of equal opportunity. These young people are told that the Civil Rights and Black Power movements of the 1960s gave them equal rights, but every institution in their lives is pervaded by racial inequality. From the underfunded schools they attend to the environmentally damaged segregated neighbourhoods they inhabit, from the aggressive policing and mass incarceration that makes them perpetual objects of surveillance and harassment to the transit racism that makes it difficult for them to travel to high opportunity neighbourhoods, they see first-hand that they are the society’s lowest priority. Clay correctly describes them as victims of organized abandonment, not just by the white supremacist power structure but also by the civil rights establishment and by black elected officials who cultivate their allegiance but do not consult them about their concerns, ideas, and aspirations.
Clay centres her inquiry on the meaning of activism for youths of colour in two social justice organizations: one focused on creating a youth services centre at a high school and the other concerned with creating anti-oppression workshops and training sessions. Through participant observation and interviews Clay introduces us to an impressive group of thoughtful, creative, and courageous young activists who insist on being active creators of a new world rather than passive spectators and consumers in the world as it is. As they grapple with what it means to be poor in a wealthy society, to be black, Latino, Asian in a society structured around the rewards of whiteness, to be queer in a world that exacts terrible costs for departures from heteronormativity, they cultivate inter-subjective and collective identities aimed at turning negative ascription into positive affirmation, at transforming segregation into congregation, at replacing degrading dehumanization with creative rehumanization. Because power is inscribed in social identities, much of their activity entails reworking racial and sexual identities through deliberative talk, role-playing exercises, and performances of oppositional music and spoken word art. Clay describes the students in her study as part of the hip-hop generation because hip-hop is a proximate practical presence in their lives, because it is the most powerful archive of collective memory available to them, and because its focus on everyday conditions and contradictions speaks directly to what they see with their own eyes everyday in language they can understand. Drawing on post-structuralist concepts about power dispersed widely through both large and small social practices and processes, Clay insists that the young people in her study deserve to be seen as activists, and she contends correctly that social movement theorists have much to learn from their work.
The young people Clay studies are certainly active, but many express discomfort with the description of themselves as activists. The ghosts of the past hang heavily over them. They know about the honourable history of mass struggles over power led by people they think deserve the designation of activists such as Huey Newton, Angela Davis, and Malcolm X. Their own efforts seem smaller, less public, less organized, and less heroic by comparison. Clay insists on the importance of crediting the work the young people are doing as full-fledged activism appropriate to the generationally inflected imperatives of their time. Yet the most important question may not be whether this is activism, but rather what kind of activism it is. Every form of activism both enables and inhibits. The emphasis these students place on personal identity and personal growth addresses issues of overwhelming importance in their lives, but that same emphasis may make it difficult for them to participate in the collective struggles of large mass organizations that would require them to ally with people who are not yet sympathetic to them. The focus on personal friendships and insider support networks in their activism may lead them to suppress disagreements, render them less able to recruit new members, and deprive them of evidence they need about how power shapes lives very different from their own. Their reliance on the cultural forms most accessible to them – such as classroom instruction, therapeutic group discussions, and performances of hip-hop and spoken word – might replicate rather than resist the individualist ethos in the US that makes it so difficult to raise an analysis of class exploitation. The shared social language that this generation derives from hip-hop might express less of a political consciousness than a fascination with entertainment and applause that can ultimately be in conflict with the slow grinding work of organizing.
These are not questions that only concern young people of colour in Oakland, California. The vengeful betrayal of the promise of the Civil Rights and Black Power era in the United States is only a small part of a predatory global system of austerity and oppression that imposes an unliveable destiny on increasing numbers of people. From Baghdad to New Orleans to Port-Au-Prince, we have seen that what happens to any of us now can happen to all of us eventually. Andreana Clay’s fine study asks and answers important questions by drawing evidence and ideas from the imagination and insights of young people struggling to survive and thrive in a society that has largely abandoned them. Clay has chosen to write a book that is not merely a chronicle of oppressed people’s suffering, but a call to action to join in their struggle. As she wisely observes in the final chapter of the book, ‘the question now is whether the rest of us are going to join the fight’ (p. 190).