I got a text from one of my students in the Social Justice Club last night that read “I was wondering if you knew where I could get the next issues of the newspaper that was handed out at the protest we attended? It was named along the lines of “communist labor party” or something like that. I remember you used to give them to a classmate and I was wondering if there’s any where I could find them whether online or if there’s some sort of mailing list.”
As I’m reading this text beaming ear to ear, I reflected on the transformation this student has gone through. In a short two years, she has gone from a somewhat introverted young woman, who fixed her hair in the mirror way too much in my opinion, into an outspoken fighter for justice. In that time she has seen a football stadium gentrify her neighborhood and the negative impact that is having on the people who have lived there for decades. She also saw a Black man suffer a slow death by the knee of a killer cop. And on top of all that, she lived through over a year of a pandemic that was allowed to ravage Black, Latin working class communities worldwide.
She is not the only one! Young people are being politicized at a rate that I haven’t seen in my lifetime. We have to be there beside them to walk with them on their journey of uncovering how to change the world. Young people will grow the Progressive Labor Party and continue to move us forward on the path to revolution.