Taking the Issue of Torture to Students at Leadership High School, San Francisco CA
For
the 6th anniversary of the opening of the Guantanamo Bay torture
camp, organizers with the SF Bay Area Chapter of World Can’t Wait and the Bay
Area Revolution Club decided to take up the call of groups like the ACLU and
Amnesty International to make public the outrage that has been growing in the
wake of revelations about destroyed torture tapes and the appointment of an
attorney general (Michael Mukasey) who tacitly approves of waterboarding.
We
felt that it was particularly important to bring this into the high schools
where the moral choices (are you for or against torture?) are less clouded by
the pragmatic considerations that people learn to accept later in life, and
where the enthusiasm and righteousness of the youth could be mobilized to help
get the rest of society off their ass.
In the week leading up to the January 11 national day of action against
torture, student organizers with World Can’t Wait and the Bay Area Revolution
Club spoke in classes and distributed orange armbands at several Bay Area high
schools.
At
Leadership High School, a diverse working class public charter school in San
Francisco, one student activist – tired of hearing her classmates say: “I would
go to the demo, trust me, I know it’s bad and I support you and all; but my
parents would fucking kill me! They don’t just let me do all this crazy stuff.
Do you know how much trouble I would get into?!”- organized a teach-in January
9 featuring revolutionary journalist Larry Everest. 4 young progressive teachers brought their advisory
classes (about 60 students total) to a large room for the presentation. On January 11, over 50 students (out of 200
in the school) at Leadership wore orange to school, and 6 students showed up
for the orange jumpsuit march down Market
Street, bringing energy and militancy to the
protest.
Taking Guantanamo
Bay to Leadership High School
“Would
you guys be surprised if I told you that what’s going on in Guantanamo would affect your whole
future?” Yes. “It’s a surprise because you”re being lied to
by the media and the government.” Larry
continued: “Do you think Americans” lives are more important than other
people’s lives?” Except for one student
trying to be a smart ass, all the students say No. “Should people from another country, or
another religion, or people who aren’t white, be subjected to things that white
Americans aren’t?” No. This set the tone
of serious engagement that continued for the rest of the presentation. Students were rowdy at first, but before long
you could hear a pin drop.
Larry
called for volunteers. A bunch of students step to the front of the class. They are getting into it now. “Imagine” here we are in San
Francisco, in school, and all of a sudden a hundred thousand
heavily armed troops from Afghanistan
parachute into your country.” Larry
points to one of the students: “You”re in a gang. Put on a jumpsuit..” He takes money out of his wallet and offers
it to students to snitch out their friends, citing the ACLU statistics that 95%
of Guantanamo detainees were turned over to the U.S. for
money. Pointing to another student,
“Someone turned you in. Get in a
jumpsuit. They said you were in a gang.” Soon, all the volunteers were in jumpsuits,
and the room was in suspense. “We don’t
tell you anything, you don’t get a phone call, or a lawyer, you don’t get to
talk to your mom. We just tell you to
come with us or we”ll kill you. You
can’t see anything or hear anything. You
don’t know what’s happening to you and you don’t know when it’s going to
end.” One courageous volunteer lies down
on one of the tables as Larry describes what it’s like to be waterboarded.
Larry
continues: “This is real. I’m not making
this stuff up. This is what George Bush,
Dick Cheney, and the rest of the U.S. government have started doing,
and they”re saying it’s OK. And this is
what Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John Edwards refuse to stop.” The students take their hoods off. One of the
students that was put in the jumpsuit was noticeably shaken and hugged a friend
for a long time after. Larry asks them how it felt; could they imagine
themselves in this position? One student
says she felt like shit. Another said
she felt helpless. Someone said he felt
scared. The last student said, “I feel
sorry for those people. And part of that
is because I didn’t know about it” which makes me a little bit guilty because
of that. And I wish I could do something
about it.” Well, there is something you
can do about it! We tell them about
wearing orange, and the protest on January 11, and how it’s on us to change
things – we can’t wait for the “leaders” to do it, since they”re the ones who
started all this.
We spend
the rest of the period in Q&A. The
students ask the tough questions about whether protesting makes a difference,
and what role do the people play in making change? One student says we need to get organized and
proposes writing letters to politicians and going on tour to other states to
make people all over the country aware of what’s going on. At the end of the discussion, most of the
students come up to us to get orange, and many stay to talk about what they can
do.
Overall,
this was a very exciting experience.
Students were extremely serious and engaged. In fact, students commented that they”ve
never seen people so quiet and attentive at Leadership High, which is an
accomplishment in and of itself! This
did not happen because students were afraid Larry and the Revolution Club were
going to discipline them, or because they were tired or secretly listening
their ipod. It’s because Larry succeeded
in grabbing their attention and walking them through the situation in Guantanamo (and the
direction the Bush Regime is taking this country and the world more generally)
in a way that made the feel the injustice of it all. This was a major breakthrough, both in terms
of working with teachers to set up this assembly, but also tactically in our
ability to reach high schoolers.
The torturer’s side of
torture?! An “extreme personal
viewpoint”?!
Of
course, such a breakthrough would not go unchallenged, even in “liberal” San Francisco, by those
who feel threatened by young people acting outside of “official” channels. After the presentation, teachers were
instructed to take students back to their classes and “debrief.” It seem clear, from our conversations with
students, that at least two of the teachers told their students that Larry’s
presentation was “one-sided” and “extreme.”
The administration was now going to introduce a curriculum to teach the
“other side” of torture, which one of the teachers described as the “Bush
Administration’s point of view.” At
least one of the teachers has already started teaching this, asking his
students, “If there are 100 people in Guantanamo
and 98 are guilty and 2 are innocent, wouldn’t it be alright to torture the two
innocents also?” One of the student
organizers responded by reading out the ACLU fact sheet pointing out that none
of the victims held in Guantanamo have had a trial (to determine “guilt” or
innocence”) and that some 300 have been released. Another said that, “There is
no good side to torture. It is wrong no matter how you look at it.”
One of
the teachers and the administration have also singled out and intimidated the
main student organizer, calling her in for meetings, telling her they didn’t
like the politics of the presentation, and that she doesn’t think for herself
because she reads Revolution newspaper.
Other students have been asked to remove their orange bandannas and told
they look like gangsters for wearing them. A letter from the principal was sent
out to the families of all students who attended the presentation stating: “We
know that the information presented was not balanced with alternative view
points. Additionally, the speaker used the opportunity to voice extreme
personal views on the nation’s political climate and administration.” Is it “extreme” to talk to give students the
facts about what their government is doing in other parts of the world? Should we present the “other side” of the
Nazi Holocaust – the Nazi perspective – and give it credence as just another
point of view? Should we teach
creationism in biology class in order to provide “balance” with the science of
evolution?
As a
letter that was sent by a World Can’t Wait organizer to the teachers who hosted
the presentation put it:
I understand that there is some controversy
about the “one-sided” nature of the presentation, which I’d like to
speak to briefly. First of all, I
completely agree with the spirit of critical thinking that we should be fostering
in students. People need to be able to
hear different sides of an issue and figure out for themselves what is
true. Debate and argumentation are good
ways of getting at the truth. But
ultimately what we are after is not simply “balance,” but truth. In terms of the presentation on Wednesday, I
thought that what Larry was mostly speaking to was the reality of what it’s
like to be a detainee at Guantanamo. That’s why we had the students get into the
orange jumpsuits and Larry described what it would be like to be taken away
from your family by people who don’t speak your languange, who don’t allow you
a lawyer, who don’t tell you what you’re being charged with, who torture you,
etc. This is not propaganda. This is reality. It’s well documented by human rights
organizations and the ACLU. George Bush
doesn’t even deny that this is happening… what he does is he tries to justify
it and legalize it. Before this presentation
very few students knew what Guantanamo
was, and even fewer knew that our government was practicing torture there. I’m sure you are all glad that the students
got informed about an important aspect of what their government is doing.
It is
understandable, given the current political climate in this country that school
administrations and teachers might feel defensive about exposing students to
ideas that contradict the Bush Regime’s official narrative. There are real fears about “rocking the
boat.” But what is most need right now
is to rock the boat” and not just with our opinions, but with the truth. Rather than isolating and repressing students
that take political initiative, these educators should feel proud to have
students that care so much about their future and the future of the planet. After all the school is called “Leadership.” Shouldn’t these students be leading the
way?
The San Francisco chapter of
World Can’t Wait and the Bay Area Revolution Club plan to continue working with
the students at leadership high in building for the national
“No-business-as-usual” day of action on January 31. Many of the students are still wearing orange
around school.