Never Trust a Billionaire’s Antiracism
The Los Angeles strike wasn’t just a teachers’ victory. It was also a tale of two competing antiracist visions — one upheld by privatizing billionaires and another pushed by working people.
Mass strikes don’t happen very often in the US. But when they do, such strikes can reveal important truths about society. By walking out for the schools students deserve, Los Angeles teachers exposed the deepening contradiction between a privatizing billionaire class and the preservation of public education in the city and around the country.
But the victorious strike also demonstrated the existence of two competing, and contradictory, proposals to fight racial injustice in Los Angeles and across the United States. The conflict in LA was a story of two antiracisms.
On the one hand, privatizers and their political lackeys like LA school board president Monica Garcia pushed charter schools as “the civil rights issue of our time.” Ending racial inequality in American schools and throughout American society, in their view, is impossible through regular public schools. Those schools have to be dismantled.
On the other hand, unionized teachers and their supporters showed that the defunding and dismantling of LA public schools was disproportionately hurting black and brown students. To fight racism in the city’s schools, they turned to their union and mass strike action. And they won big.
The conflict in LA has demonstrated that these two visions are irreconcilable — and how a fighting working class can advance an uncompromising antiracist vision that exposes the bankruptcy of education privatizers’ racial justice rhetoric.
Working-Class Antiracism
By building a vibrant, multiracial mass movement for both economic and social justice, UTLA has put the lie to the constant equation of organized labor, and working-class politics, with old white guys in hard hats. That pundits continue to make this assumption says more about their own class location than it does about the actual gender and racial diversity of the labor movement.
UTLA’s approach was straightforward: combine specific antiracist initiatives with a strategic focus on uniting workers of all backgrounds around their common interests. Upon taking office in 2014, the new UTLA leadership’s first major initiative was to win a 10 percent pay increase for its mostly female, nonwhite membership. “Winning that raise was a necessary initial step towards restoring [our] members’ confidence in the union,” notes UTLA’s Arlene Inouye.
Union leaders subsequently pivoted to a broader fight for more school funding, lower classes, better public schools, and an end to privatization. Significantly, UTLA has raised demands not only for its members, but for working people generally — an approach known as “bargaining for the common good.” And since working-class problems such as school underfunding, low wages, and privatization are especially acute for communities of color, these broad demands are fundamentally antiracist, as writers like Briahna Joy Gray have shown.
The disparities between California’s school districts are some of the worst in the nation, rivaling CONTINUE READING: Never Trust a Billionaire’s Antiracism
