BROOKLYN, August 29—This summer, a multiracial group of more than 30 Kingsborough Community College students and workers held a beach barbecue called “Unity in the Community,” to review and celebrate the past year of struggle, and plan for the year ahead. Short speeches summarizing the past year, political discussions about CHALLENGE, good food, and sports were the orders of the day as old friends reconnected and new friendships were kindled!
Anti-racist and anti-sexist political struggle are what unites these workers and students, who hailed from Africa, across the Middle East and South Asia, the Caribbean, and Latin America. Many of them participated in various struggles throughout the past year, while others were relative newcomers.
A year of building struggle
In late 2017, Kingsborough cafeteria workers suffered under incompetent and racist management. They endured the indignities of obeying orders from lazy sexist supervisors and incompetent administrators at the College. The workers, many of them parents, saw the absurdity of their working conditions. As we engaged in discussions over the semester, their political awareness began to grow, culminating in a bold and powerful rally. Students and staff banded together in a direct confrontation with administrators and NYPD at the President’s office.
At the end that semester, we made contact and began to build relationships with students of the Muslim Association on campus. We learned of their struggles on campus. In the spring semester we built on those discussions to take action against a racist stooge of the administration who admitted to spying on the Muslim Association. Students took the lead in confronting the racist and the administrators who supported him, resulting in his ouster. The leadership in the Muslim Association has to deal with years of history of control by faculty and administrators as well as sexism in their own group. The success of this struggle led to the beginning of another struggle to call out and oust a racist, sexist and homophobic administrator on campus, Michael Goldstein, who is protected by a network of Zionists among the faculty.
Building collective leadership
Students at the barbecue explained the collective process that went into writing the leaflet calling for Goldstein’s termination, and the collective decision-making that went into how best to distribute them and involve more students. A strength of the struggle against Goldstein is that it is drawing in and developing strong women leaders among students who have never participated in political struggle before.
PL’ers who have been involved alongside the KCC students and workers commented on the development of strong women leadership through the struggle, and talked about how important CHALLENGE has been in sharing news about these struggles among the students and workers on campus. They connected the cholera outbreaks in Yemen or Haiti to imperialist rivalry and capitalism’s insatiable need for profits and labor to exploit. They stressed that the bosses’ media always buries these stories, and that is why everyone must help sell and write for CHALLENGE. As students passed around CHALLENGE, several new contacts were made, as well as plans for new PLP study groups.
Struggle continues
Students and workers brainstormed on how to build on and sharpen the struggles of the previous year, and how to reach out to more of the 10,000 or so students on campus. They unanimously agreed that this event should be held annually! As one student put it, “we needed this. With everything going on in the world, we need to keep doing this every year for the students after us.”
Political struggle shows that education is far more than just about sitting in a classroom and learning from books or lectures from professors. Political struggle gives us a vision of a world to fight for, and a goal for our education in all subjects.
This barbecue served to break down barriers and expand the bonds of solidarity among the segregated groups of students, as well as the workers who came: the custodial, cafeteria and faculty.
With stronger personal and political ties, we head back to school this semester with the promise of struggle and hopefully even greater victories.