Introduction: Youth as a Category through which Class is Lived
Pepi Leistyna
Take control of your life before we do!
—Sheriff of Suffolk County (Billboard on the highway overlooking The Suffolk County House of Corrections, Boston, MA [2004])
1.1 This
special issue from Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor was
conceptualized and assembled with the intent of addressing how class structures
and struggles dramatically affect the diversity of youth around the globe
as they face a history of, and increasing subjugation to, the economic,
political, and cultural logic of capital. Corporations, in the name of
globalization and neoliberalism, are running rampant around the planet
in search of endless profits. Propagating the myth of free market principles
as they go, it's only about 500 transnational corporations that actually
control 80 percent of global investment and 70 percent of trade. In the
guise of democracy and free trade, imperialist governments that preach
deregulation and the natural flow of market principles are applying diplomatic
and military pressure on other nations in order to secure unlimited access
to cheap labor, raw materials, and new areas of investment. What is in
fact regulation in favor of the transnational corporate giants—that needless
to say despise and work to crush competition, is leading to the virtual
elimination of national sovereignty in many countries. The sweep-of-the-hand
mandates of such financial organizations as the International Monetary
Fund and the World Trade Organization reveal the grand contradiction between
capitalism and democracy. Rather than encourage public participation,
neoliberalism makes it that much easier for invading corporate interests
to smash democratic grassroots
movements, environmental protections, and social policies and institutions
developed to help secure the public's well being.
1.2 Unfortunately, in the midst of theoretical battles over globalization and a politics of identity and difference, class as an analytic distinction has somehow been buried in the upheavals of endless shelling. In the United States this is not surprising given that the country's history, from colonialism on, has been built on the interests of the business classes that produce and benefit from the denial of the economic, political, and cultural realities of a class system. But such disavowal contradicts the myth of the American dream which implies a class structure as it romanticizes the movement from the bottom to the top of the economic ladder.
1.3 One
needn't go far within the borders of the United States to be exposed to
class divisions and conflicts. In what is now a post-industrial society—a
society that relies on service industries, knowledge production, and information
technology rather than industrial manufacturing to generate capital—the
average wage is 29 percent less than it was during the days of industry.
Within these economic shifts, the middle class is imploding into the working
class, which in turn is imploding into the working poor who are literally
relegated to life in the streets. Census data show that the gap between
the rich and the poor in this country to be the widest since the government
started collecting information in 1947. In fact, the U.S. has the most
unequal distribution of wealth and income in the industrialized world.
As Holly Sklar (2002) points out:
…33 million Americans are poor in this richest nation on earth. That's more than the combined population of the District of Columbia plus 21 states: Alaska, Arkansas, Delaware, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Utah, Vermont, West Virginia and Wyoming. (2)
Keep in mind the federal poverty thresholds:
one person under 65 = $9,214, two people under 65 with one child = $12,207.
"Twenty-nine percent of American families make less than what the Economic
Policy Institute estimates is needed to meet basic needs—a national median
of $33,551" (Jackson, 2001: 4). 6.8 million families live in poverty.
43.6 million Americans lack health insurance. This is a particularly interesting
statistic given that "the average compensation for the top health care
executives at the top 10 managed healthcare companies, not including unexercised
stock options, is $11.7 million per year" (Jackson, 2001: 3). To generate
the enormous profits to cover these salaries, insurance premiums are going
up, patient coverage is being weakened, and, regardless of the North American
Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the praise of free market principles,
people in the U.S. are legally prohibited from buying less expensive prescription
drugs from Canada.
1.4 The
richest 1 percent of Americans controls about 40 percent of the nation's
wealth; the top 5 percent has more than 60 percent (Collins, Hartman &
Sklar, 1999). The nation's wealthiest 10 percent own almost 90 percent
of all stocks and mutual funds (Collins, Hartman & Sklar, 1999). While
one in two Americans don't 
own
stocks, the ubiquitous numbers from Wall Street imply that the market
will help those in need and the country as a whole.
1.5 Unemployment
in the U.S. has hovered at about 6 percent since George W. Bush took office
as the President, and approximately 3 million jobs have been lost during
his tenure (United States Department of Labor, 2003). These job losses
are not merely lay-offs caused by hard economic times; nor are they a
direct result of 9/11 as conservatives would have us believe. With capital
flight and global outsourcing, both blue collar and white collar jobs
have been and continue to be exported by U.S. corporations to nations
that pay below a living wage and that ensure that workers have no protection
under labor unions and laws that regulate corporate interests and power.
And as the Federal Reserve has noted, these jobs won't be returning even
if there is a major upswing in the U.S. economy. Bush has bragged about
creating new jobs for Americans, but he fails to inform the public that
these are overwhelmingly part-time, adjunct, minimum-wage positions that
provide no pension, union protection, or healthcare benefits. Part-time,
temp, or subcontracted jobs currently make up 30 percent of the workforce
and this number is rapidly increasing.
1.6 As
the minimum wage is currently $5.15 an hour, full-time workers in the
United States make about $10,712 a year—recall that the poverty level
for an individual is $9,214. This makes it impossible to afford adequate
housing throughout the country. "In fact, in the median state a minimum-wage
worker would have to work 87 hours each week to afford a two-bedroom apartment
at 30 percent of his or her income, which is the federal definition of
affordable housing” (National Coalition for the Homeless, 1999: 3). "A
couple with two kids would have to work a combined 3.3 full-time minimum-wage
jobs to make ends meet" (Ellison, 2001: 3). It's no wonder that one out
of every five homeless people is employed. It is important to note that
contrary to popular myth, the majority of minimum-wage workers are not
teenagers: 71.4 percent are over the age of 20 (National Coalition for
the Homeless, 1999). The average income in the United States is shrinking
and workers are earning less, adjusting for inflation, than they did a
quarter century ago. Meanwhile,
median CEO pay at the 100 largest companies in Fortune's survey rose 14 percent last year to $13.2 million. Still, average CEO pay in Business Week's survey was $7.4 million. It would take 241 years for an average worker paid $30,722 to make that amount. (Sklar, 2003: 4)
The ratio of average CEO pay in the
U.S. to the average blue-collar worker pay in the same corporation is
470 to 1. Although the average worker in this country now has to labor
for more hours each year to make ends meet than in the last 3 decades,
the current Bush administration wants to make revisions to the 1938 Fair
Labor Standards Act that would take the 40-hour workweek away, and it
wants to limit over-time pay that more than 8 million people rely on to
financially keep their heads above water.
1.7 At
the same time Bush's Whitehouse, with the support of big business, is
scrambling to "legalize" undocumented workers. In response to a shortage
of low-wage, low-skill employees, the current administration, claiming
it is concerned with the human rights of undocumented labor in this country,
is looking into a Guest Worker Program. This wouldn't be the first time
the government has done so. The Bracero Program, in 1942 "legally"
allowed more than 4 million Mexican farm laborers into the U.S. to work
the fields and orchards. These workers spoke little to no English, signed
contracts that were controlled by independent farmers associations and
the Farm Bureau, and were immediately put to work without an understanding
of their rights. In 1964, when the Bracero Program was finally dismantled,
the U.S. Department of Labor officer heading the operation, Lee G. Williams,
described the operation as "legalized slavery." Thus, being pro-immigrant
does not necessarily mean being pro social justice. Today the harsh reality
is that beyond the concocted hype about the usurping of quality employment
by "outsiders," the job opportunities that are intended for
migrant workers, the majority of immigrants, and the nation's own down-trodden,
consist of low-wage manual labor: cleaning crews, food service, the monotony
of the assembly-line, and farm work.
1.8 In
need of government protections and tax relief, workers in the United States
don't get the red carpet treatment that corporations do. 60 percent of
U.S. companies pay no income tax. By the year 2000, the corporate share
of taxes had fallen to 17 percent (Soll, 2002). Corporations find creative
ways to keep from paying the 35 percent tax on profits that they are legally
compelled to cover. And yet the IRS "audits low-income Americans, specifically
those who receive the Earned Income Tax Credit, much more frequently than
it does wealthy Americans" (Soll, 2002: 8). Meanwhile the government has
provided billions of dollars in tax cuts to the rich, and corporations
are provided with $125 billion a year in corporate subsidies, tax breaks,
and other forms of welfare; and this doesn't include the $400-plus billion
that is funneled through the Pentagon's military industrial complex. Here
the government socializes risk and investment while the public pays for
the research and product development, but privatizes the profits. Its
frantic deficit spending is a conscious effort to wipe out any money to
sustain the public sector, making the privatization of healthcare, Medicare
and Medicaid, social security, schools, etc. the only available option.
1.9 The
working class not only pays for 'endless' wars with their tax dollars
and by sustaining program cuts that fund these 'adventures in capitalism'—as
the Wall Street Journal proudly advertises them— but with the lives
of their children as well who make up the majority of combat soldiers.
Bush, in his most recent State of the Union Address (1/20/04) shared with
his captive audience a letter that he had received from a ten-year-old
girl named Ashly, asking the president what she could do to help the nation.
On top of the typical hypocritical response of "work hard in school"
and "help someone in need," he closed by saying, "And when
you see a man or woman in uniform, say thank you." But Americans
shouldn't be fooled by the vulgar patriotism that is supposed to go with
being part of "an army of one"—the current Bush administration
cut funds for veteran's health care, closed seven veteran hospitals, tried
to cut Federal Impact Aid offered since 1950 to school districts that
provide educational services to military children that live off-base,
proposed doubling costs for prescription drugs for veterans, and the Pentagon
had even planned to cut pay for troops serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Perhaps most disturbing is the fact that 40 percent of homeless men in
America have served in the armed forces.
1.10 Pointing
out the ubiquity of swindles and greed that make up the political economy
of corporate life, Bernie Sanders (2002) notes:
One of the most egregious forms of corporate welfare can be found at a little known federal agency called the Export-Import Bank, an institution that has a budget of about $1 billion a year and the capability of putting at risk some $15.5 billion in loan guarantees annually. Over 80 percent of the subsidies distributed by the Export-Import Bank goes to Fortune 500 corporations. Among the companies that receive taxpayer support from the Export-Import Bank is Enron, Boeing, Halliburton, Mobil Oil, IBM, General Electric, AT&T, Motorola, Lucent Technologies, FedEx, General Motors, Raytheon, and United Technologies….The great irony of the Export-Import Bank policy is that in the name of 'job creation' a substantial amount of federal funding goes to corporations that are eliminating hundreds of thousands of American jobs. American workers are providing funding to companies that are shutting down the plants in which they work and are moving them to China, Mexico, Vietnam, and wherever they can find cheap labor. (11)
By cheap labor, we're often talking
between 13.5 and 36 cents an hour; we're also talking about a total disregard
for child-labor laws and environmental protections (National Labor Committee
for Worker and Human Rights, 2003).
1.11 As
one of the largest corporations on the planet with revenues in 2002 of
$31.7 billion, let's use General Electric as case example of the kind
of corporate "virtue" that neoliberals want the world to embrace.
Contradicting the basic principles of capitalism, GE has benefited from
massive federal subsidies and $2.5 billion in direct loans and loan guarantees
from the Export-Import Bank (Sanders, 2002). This is a corporation that
has been very vocal over the years about its efforts to globalize its
workforce, holding true to its word by cutting hundreds of thousands of
jobs in the U.S. over the past thirty years. Jack Welch, the former CEO
of GE, and good friend of the Reagan administration, stated, "Ideally,
you'd have every plant you own on a barge." This is a company that
reduced the life of its light bulbs during the Depression in order to
increase its profits, was busted for working with a German weapons manufacturer
during the Second World War, and has been convicted of a number of fraudulent
practices. Contributing to the Republican Party over the years, and involved
in weapons production and sales and developing nuclear technologies, GE,
a corporation that ironically wields the motto "We bring good things
to life," has a long history of anti-unionism and is currently partaking
in union busting in Mexico so that it doesn't have to pay the workers
a living wage to produce its products. On the cultural front, this corporate
giant is trying to merge with Vivendi Universal Entertainment and consequently
take control of Universal Pictures and a number of cable channels and
create NBC Universal—what would be the world's sixth largest media company.
GE would have even more power over the types of stories about youth and
labor that could be disseminated on a grand scale.
1.12 Within
this antagonistic economic climate mass upheavals and uprisings are possible,
but the elite classes work diligently to suppress political and cultural
dissent and the dissemination of substantive information to the public.
Within corporate-dominated media, the business press which addresses the
financial concerns of so few saturates the society and readily demonizes
organized labor in the public eye. Meanwhile, what was at
one time a vibrant labor press dealing with such substantive issues as
union organizing, child care, health insurance, workplace safety, and
providing a living wage, is virtually extinct in mainstream media. While
workers in unions earn 30 percent more than non-union people doing the
same job, and get far more guaranteed benefits such as a pension and healthcare,
the republican assault on organized labor has been devastating. By 2002,
only 13.2 percent of wage and salary workers were union members—a number
that is getting smaller every year (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2003).
Regardless of the federal law (Section 7 of the National Labor Relations
Act) that states that
Employees shall have the right to self organization, to form, join or assist labor organizations, to bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing and to engage in other concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection…
the harsh reality is that those who
try to organize often face serious repercussions. Human Rights Watch has
recorded that ten to twenty thousand people a year are fired or punished
for trying to unionize. Low-wage earners in particular face an atmosphere
of intimidation and as a result many, desperate for work, steer clear
of union activity.
1.13 As
far as political influence is concerned, according to the Center for Responsive
Politics, "Some 80 percent of all political contributions now come
from less than 1 percent of the population" (Collins, Hartman & Sklar,
1999: 5). It should thus come as no surprise that most of the public policy
debate remains in the confines of the Wall Street and Fortune 500 agenda.
1.14 Where
does all this corporate globe trotting leave children? Of the 6.3 billion
people that currently live on the planet, almost half of them are under
that age of 25. Half the world's 1 billion poor are children. 11 million
of them under the age of 5 die annually because of malnutrition, dirty
water, disease, and poor housing. Hundreds of millions of kids around
the world are not getting a formal education and millions are trapped
in sweat shops or caught up in military conflicts where they are often
forced into fighting someone else's economic wars.
1.15 In
the United States, according to the U.S. Census Bureau (2002), "In 2001,
11.7 million children, or 16.3 percent, were poor” (2). 9.2 million children
have no health insurance, and millions do not even have a decent home.
An Urban Institute study revealed that about 3.5 million people are homeless
in the U.S. [a number projected to increase 5 percent each year] and 1.3
million (or 39 percent) of them are children (National Coalition for the
Homeless, 2002). The nation ranks 17th of all industrialized
countries in efforts to eradicate poverty among children and 23rd
in infant mortality. And this is the great "success" model that
capitalists are boasting and selling globally, or more accurately, forcing
down the throats of the world.
1.16 During
the week of International Human Rights Day, the Kensington Welfare Rights
Union went to Geneva, Switzerland to expose to the world the violations
of economic human rights occurring in the U.S. The organization highlighted
the Bush administration's economic policies that lead to increased poverty,
homelessness, unemployment, lack of healthcare, and limited access to
quality water, food, heat, and education. The group is also protesting
government and media efforts to silence the economically oppressed.
1.17 The
institutions that shape mass culture in the United States, such as schools
and the media, do in fact avoid inspiring talk about class and misery
in the domain of public discourse. While there is a recognition and romanticization
of a grand middle class, particularly during election time, this category
generally works to obfuscate the realities of class conflict. Meanwhile,
the poor and the rich are depicted as living on the polar edges of the
society's economic spectrum. According to the mythology, they are not
dialectically intertwined and thus exist apart from each other. In fact,
the super rich are made virtually invisible in this country—other than
showing off their lavish lifestyles on entertainment television. As Michael
Parenti (2000) points out, 1 percent of the population goes undocumented
in income distribution reports because U.S. Census Bureau surveys are
not distributed to the wealthiest of Americans such as Michael Eisner
who in 1996 as the CEO of Disney made $565 million or Larry Ellison the
CEO of Oracle who made $706 million in 2001. The Census computer, which
bypasses the long-term unemployed and the homeless, is said to not be
able to process income above $1 million. As such, if you make over $100,000
your class status is nationally in the top 4 percent—an absurd misrepresentation
to say the least. It is equally ridiculous to claim that supercomputers
are
brilliant enough to get us to Mars on Bush's newest corporate endeavor
and deficit binge, but not intelligent enough to count and process above
one million.
1.18 Unequal
property relations, the exploitation of labor, and the concomitant class
conflicts that reveal different economic, political, and cultural interests
need to be explored if much of the lived experience of youth is to be
understood. In particular, this special issue focuses on how national
security, educational institutions and policies, and media ownership work
to confine, shape, and demobilize youth.
What To Do With All Those Throw
Away Kids?
2.1 Henry
Giroux, in his contribution to this special issue—"Disappearing Youth
in the Age of George W. Bush," reveals how conservatives are "dismantling
the parts of the public sector that serve the social and democratic needs
of the non-affluent majority of the American populace." He examines
how the State is developing and implementing repressive and punitive social
policies to contain "disposable" youth as massive budget cuts
for war and other corporate exploits gut domestic funding for education,
health care, and other public needs and services. Giroux reveals how the
class and racial war being waged against young people is playing out in
public schools that are increasingly being militarized with the addition
of armed guards, security systems, and raids of the likes of Stratford
High School's when students this year were held at gunpoint for a random
drug check by police in the poor community of Goose Creek, South Carolina.
Giroux also challenges zero-tolerance policies and practices and the criminalization
of working-class, poor, homeless, and racially subordinated youth as they
feed into the expansion of the prison-industrial complex as a way to contain
disposable populations.
2.2 Prisons
have been strategically used within the feudalism of today's capitalist
social relations to lock up what are seen as superfluous populations that
the powers that be have no immediate use for (Bortner & Williams,
1997; Cole, 2000; Davis, 2000; Dyer, 2001; James 2002; Mauer & The
Sentencing Project, 2001; Parenti, 2000; Rosenblatt, 1996). As Loic Wacquant
(2002) states, "The astounding upsurge in black incarceration in
the past three decades results from the obsolescence of the ghetto as
a device for caste control and the correlative need for a substitute apparatus
for keeping (unskilled) African Americans in a subordinate and confined
position—physically, socially, and symbolically" (23).
2.3 As
a member of a community leadership and social justice team in Boston,
I was recently allowed to "tour" the Suffolk County House of
Corrections. What was immediately apparent about this depressing scene,
though I had fully anticipated it, was that the overwhelming majority
of inmates were racially subordinated—mostly African Americans and Latinos.
Those that were White were marked as working poor by their teeth, tattoos,
and speech, and especially their stories. What was equally upsetting about
the Suffolk scene was that almost everyone in this stark environment was
young. At 38, I felt like an old man in a sea of youth(s). But the concept
of youth didn't connote a free-spirited, open-ended quest for future aspirations.
On the contrary, the room was threadbare with despair, gloom, anger, silence,
and pain. As one African-American young man stated to me after I moved
away from the prison guards and into the crowd:
2.4 In
addition to containment, where there's profit—in what's increasingly turning
into one of the nation's largest growing privatized business endeavors—there's
demand. The prison population in the United States has consequently skyrocketed
over 200 percent since 1980.1
There are now over two million people in jail in the U.S., and although
we have only 5 percent of the world's population, we have 25 percent of
its prisoners.2 The U.S. surpassed Russia
in the year 2000 and now has the world's highest incarceration rate. It
is 5 to 17 times higher than all other Western nations. By the close of
the millennium, 6.3 million people were on probation, in jail or prison,
or on parole in this country.
2.5 Over
70 percent of prisoners in the U.S. are from non-European racial and ethnic
backgrounds. African-American males make up the largest number of those
entering prisons each year in the United States. Racially subordinated
women are also being incarcerated in epidemic proportions. One can only
imagine the psychological and academic effects on children when their
parents are locked up. And yet, this insatiable appetite for incarceration
comes from the same bunch that preaches "family values" and the need for
parents to play a bigger role in children's lives.
2.6 While
the validity of these incarceration statistics is not in question in national
discussions, there is great contestation as to why they exist. Conservatives
endlessly wield racist and class-specific representations of violent groups
that need to be contained. When young people are represented (as opposed
to self-described) in the media, especially the poor and racially subordinated,
they are overwhelmingly depicted as dangerous and untrustworthy. There
is no accompanying discussion of unemployment, poverty, the alienating
and commodified junk culture, or the destructive logic of the market that
deeply affects their lives.
2.7 While
racism can't be completely conflated with the economic base of capitalism,
we certainly need to look at the ways in which it is used to exploit diverse
groups within capitalist social relations. As a socio-political 
construction,
racism, like class, is structurally part of the U.S. economy, politics,
and culture and serves an important role in keeping at bay working-class
unity and maintaining a system of labor exploitation. As E. San Juan,
Jr. (2003) argues, "Race and class are dialectically cojoined in
the reproduction of capitalist relations of exploitation and domination"
(9). While the construct of youth and the realities of racism and class
conflict always need to be understood within particular historical and
geopolitical specificities, given the current historical juncture, much
of race relations and race conflict are structured by the demands of neoliberalism
as it plays out both locally and globally.
2.8 Molly
Secours, in her contribution to this special issue—"Minority and
Disenfranchised Youth in Juvenile Justice: A Dominant Majority Problem—Reframing
and Renaming the Issues," expands on Giroux's analysis of the militarization
of society and the role of the prison-industrial complex by focusing on
how White supremacy functions dialectically with the logic of capital
to keep racially subordinated youth locked down in prisons. Secours' narratives
put human faces on the misery of the prison-industrial complex and she
insists that the "dominant majority" be forced to confront the
fact that asymmetrical relations of power produce economic, political,
and cultural margins, misery, deviance, and resistance.
Class Warfare in
Public Schools
3.1 Regardless
of all the national hype about youth and violence, and a growing body
of research in the social sciences documenting the neglect of so many
young people in the United States, it is dumbfounding how few links are
made in mainstream debates in this country, between government and socially-sanctioned
policies and practices that have historically harmed children and their
families, and the increasing violence involving kids (Leistyna, Woodrum
& Sherblom, 1996). As Noam Chomsky (1999) points out, the obvious
effects of such historical conditions are "you get violence against children
and violence by children" (110). Abusive policies that embody class warfare
are particularly prevalent in public schools as these institutions act
as powerful agencies that not only help turn kids into fodder for prisons
by forcing them out and onto the streets, but they also function to reproduce
the "normalcy" of capitalist social relations, and generate
a semi-skilled workforce.
3.2 Since
President George W. Bush signed into law the Elementary and Secondary
Education Act of 2001, better known as No Child Left Behind (NCLB),
high-stakes testing has been officially embraced and positioned to be
the panacea of academic underachievement in public schools in the United
States. The Act engenders a hitherto unheard-of transfer of power to federal
and state governments, granting them the rights to largely determine the
goals and outcomes of these educational institutions. As a direct result
of this new conservative agenda, school administrators, teachers, communities,
and parents are stripped of any substantive decision-making power in the
nation's public schools. The negotiating powers of teacher unions are
also in the cross hairs of this assault on public education.
3.3 Embracing
what is in fact an old neoliberal approach dressed up as innovative reform,
proponents of this market-driven educational model make use of words and
phrases like equity, efficiency, and the enhancement of global competitiveness,
to continue to sell to the public their agenda. However, this same political
machinery—this synergy between government and the corporate sector—shrouds,
in the name of "choice," conservative efforts to privatize public
schools by forcing their failure and collapse and subsequently channeling
public funds to private firms that love the idea that mandatory education
means mandatory consumers.
3.4 In
this "no corporation left behind" agenda, where 6 million children
have thus far been left in the wake, devoted advocates of current education
legislation effectively disguise the motivations of a profit-driven testing
industry led by publishing power houses like McGraw-Hill, which is the
largest producer of standardized tests in the country. In the end, corporate
elites of the likes of Harold McGraw III, CEO of 
McGraw-Hill,
who was appointed by President Bush to the Transition Advisory Committee
on Trade, will be the only ones to gain from this national obsession with
standardized assessment (Metcalf, 2002). No Child Left Behind leaves
little to no room for success in public schools, but plenty of room for
profits—$7 billion in materials alone. Corporations like McGraw-Hill gain
financially by selling their materials on a grand scale, and by the ways
that schools with such limited and limiting curricula, pedagogy, and skills
development will now guarantee the production of a low and semi-skilled
labor force that is in high demand in our now post-industrial service-oriented
economy.
3.5 Under
pressure to produce results on these standardized tests, or face the consequences
of cuts in federal resources and funding, school closure, and in some
cases law suits, many school administrators have been forced to drastically
narrow their curriculum and cut back on anything and everything that is
perceived as not contributing to raising test scores. Within this one-size-fits-all
standards approach to schooling, the multifarious voices and needs of
culturally diverse, low-income, racially subordinated, and linguistic-minority
students are simply ignored or discarded.
3.6 Many
Republicans, and Democrats alike, also embrace the national movement towards
draconian English-Only language and literacy policies and practices. With
no defensible theory or body of research to support his claim, Ron Unz,
the multimillionaire spearhead of this movement, nonetheless maintains
that linguistic-minority students require only one year of Structured
Immersion in an English-only context in order to join native speakers
in mainstream classes. However, as James Crawford (2003) notes:
In 2002-2003, it [Unz’s Structured English Immersion] failed at least 1,479,420 children who remained limited in English. Only 42 percent of California students whose English was limited in 1998, when Proposition 227 passed, have since been redesignated as fluent in English—five years later! (1)
With five years of watered down content,
rather than intensive subject instruction in the primary language, these
linguistic-minority students—75 percent of whom reside in low-income,
urban areas that have schools that are highly segregated and literally
falling apart—will certainly be ill-prepared for high-stakes tests. In
states like Massachusetts, students who do not pass the state's standardized
test in high school will not graduate. Instead they will be shown to the
door and handed a Certificate of Attendance on their way out; unless of
course like so many others they "drop out" beforehand. Under-funded
and purposely misguided, these federal and state programs are designed
to fail to secure any future for so many youth.
3.7 As
advocates of the corporate model of schooling hide behind positivist notions
of science, objectivity, neutrality and "universal" knowledge
to justify class structure and stratification, what is largely missing
from national debates and federal and state policies regarding public
education is a recognition and analysis of the social and historical conditions
within which teachers teach and learners learn; that is, how class warfare,
racism, and other oppressive and malignant ideologies that inform actual
educational practices and institutional conditions play a much more significant
role in students' academic achievement than whether or not they have access
to abstract content and constant evaluation. For those throw-away masses,
a callous social infrastructure, constant exposure to harsh material and
symbolic conditions both inside and outside of school, incessant harassment,
segregated school activities, limited, exclusionary, and distorted curricula,
ill-prepared teachers, and apathetic and abusive educator attitudes and
pedagogies work to virtually ensure the self-fulfilling prophesy of youth
failure, deviance, and resistance (Kozol, 1996; Leistyna, 2002). As two
former students that had been kicked out of an urban public school told
me:
Stevie: I hate that school. Somebody oughta blow it up! They're a bunch of jerks man, I swear to god! You know what I notice Pepi, I noticed when I used to go to school, if the teachers knew you came from a nice like middle-class neighborhood, they'd treat you good. They give you special attention. But if they knew you came from the projects or something….
Carlos: If you come from a bad neighborhood they make sure you never make it.
3.8 What's
key to cultural reproduction is ensuring that the oppressive ideologies
that inform dominant discourse in this country go unquestioned. This is
the primary role of conservative educators like Diane Ravitch, Lynne Cheney,
and William Bennett—omnipresent spokespersons for the Republican Party—who
argue against any effort to deconstruct the underlying values, interests,
and power relationships that structure educational policies and practices,
insisting that such analysis has corrupted the academic environment. Likewise,
the well-funded think tanks that produce much of the research and literature
to support conservative educational causes also have an obvious, ideologically-specific
take on these issues, one that is widely supported by mainstream corporate
media whose ownership have similar interests (Haas, Molnar & Serrano,
2002; McChesney & Nichols, 2002). The goal of depoliticizing the public's
understanding of social institutions, especially schools, in the name
of neutrality simply functions to maintain the status quo.
3.9 Corporate
guided education is certainly not concerned with infusing civic responsibility
in preparation for public life; rather, it is about ensuring the dissemination
of a particular market logic within which labor 
stratification
is embraced and confirmed (Anyon, 1980; Apple, 2001; Bourdieu & Passeron,
1977; Bowles & Gintis, 1976; Giroux, 2001; Saltman, 2000).
Given this reality, Stanley
Aronowitz, in his contribution to this special issue—"Against Schooling:
Education and Social Class," argues that we shouldn't conflate "schooling"
with "education." "Schooling" functions to offer credentials,
and "contrary to their democratic pretensions, they [schools] teach
conformity to the social, cultural, and occupational hierarchy."
Aronowitz holds that educational institutions are not designed to engage
students in studying labor history or reading the world critically, creatively,
and independently; nor are they, he insists, intended to nurture politically
active citizens. Rather than provide this type of "education,"
schools, he argues, function to leave working-class students at the bottom
of the academic hierarchy and consequently with limited occupational choices,
if any.
3.10 Ellen
Brantlinger, in her contributing chapter—"An Application of Gramsci's
'Who Benefits?' to High-Stakes Testing," extends this critique of
public education and high-stakes testing by analyzing who benefits from
this evaluative format. Brantlinger implicates test producers, trans-global
capitalists, media moguls, conservative politicians and political pundits,
religious conservatives, enterprising school superintendents, advocates
of school privatization, and the educated middle class in the failing
of so many working-class, linguistic-minority, and racially subordinated
students.
3.11 Dennis
Carlson's "Leaving Children Behind: Urban Education, Class Politics,
and the Machines of Transnational Capitalism," offers alternatives
to this one-size-fits-all approach to schooling and evaluation. He argues
in favor of educational transformation and action research but warns that
the current hegemonic discourse in urban school renewal focuses too much
attention on individual schools' success or failure with students thus
shifting attention away from the larger discourses, structures, and technologies
of domination, inequity, and oppression that are implicated in the social
production of failure among urban youth.
3.12 These
critical educators argue that students should not only be included in
the developmental process of curricula in schools, but they should also
be mobilized into organized political bodies (critical communities of
struggle) able to voice their concerns and realize their own goals. Educators
and other public cultural workers desperately need to forge creative partnerships
with youth in order to analyze and confront the oppressive conditions
and social formations that have inevitably manufactured and imposed a
history of despair. Not only do students readily express an interest in
their own lives and what they are deeply connected to, but they also generate
a great interest in education and the state of society if allowed to connect
in substantive and politically influential ways to the very world around
them (Cooper, 2000; Featherstone, 1999; Jenkins, 1998; Lipsitz, 1994;
Martinez, 2000; Ross & Rose, 1994).
3.13 What
is key to developing presence of mind among diverse youth is the recognition
that political consciousness and action do not take place in a vacuum.
Class not only consists of a structural reality built on political and
economic processes and relationships, it also relies on symbolic systems
to shape the kinds of meaning, identity, desire, and subjectivity that
can work to ensure the maintenance of what Antonio Gramsci (1971) referred
to as the hegemony of "common sense." Thus, in order to effectively
create self-empowering conditions for youth to come to voice, young people
need to be encouraged to problematize the sources and sensibilities of
their own subjectivities. In Paulo Freire's (1985) words: "As active
participants and real subjects, we can make history only when we are continually
critical of our very lives" (199). It is thus imperative, as Aronowitz
points out, for educators to tap into the other pedagogical sites, beyond
schools, that shape youth consciousness, dreams, and desires.
Globalization, Representational
Politics and the Shaping of Class Consciousness
4.1 Understanding
youth subjectivities without essentializing them (as there is an enormous
amount of intragroup diversity that constitutes this analytic distinction)
entails examining the effects of material conditions, relations of production
and distribution, and political regulation on people's lives, as well
as the influences of cultural/representational politics—which are primarily
occupied with how meaning is produced, circulated, legitimated, and consumed
in society. In considering how meaning, consumption, and leisure are not
mutually exclusive to production, labor, and institutions, a central challenge
for critical cultural workers is to apprentice youth into examining the
current state of systems of production and distribution and theorizing
how they may complement or conflict (or both) with political and cultural
logics. The approach encouraged here is to identify the leading reactionary
or transformative forces and their relationships with other social factors.
4.2 This
in part entails understanding culture as a pedagogical force in which
the multiplicity of aural and visual signifying systems that people are
inundated with everyday, through language, TV, advertising, radio, print
journalism, music, film, and so on, are ideological and formative, rather
than merely vehicles for expression or reflections of reality. They are
the conduits through which dominant values and beliefs that work to shape
how people see, interpret, and act as socialized and political beings,
can be promoted. These pedagogical forces have worked to shape public
consciousness about youth and the working class and poor and they have
worked to shape and justify socially-sanctioned practices and policies
that go against the best interests of labor and those in need. For example,
in 1998 there were 24,000 documented acts of corporate lawbreaking, yet
the media barely gave it a notice. As such, it shouldn't be surprising
that so many people were suddenly shocked by the recently "discovered"
corporate abuses and atrocities of corporate giants of the likes of Enron,
Tyco, and Worldcom. Because profit-driven journalism only allows for spectacle
and infotainment, as it is controlled by a corporate elite who wish to
protect their own interests and not offend their advertisers, there was
no early investigation into such malfeasance.
4.3 While
the myth of a liberal media bias persists, Hollywood and the corporate
media giants—Viacom, News Corporation, AOL Time Warner, General Electric,
and Walt Disney have rarely produced positive representations of labor
(Aronowitz, 1992; Booker, 1999; Butsch, 1995; Ehrenreich, 1995; Herman
& Chomsky, 2002; Mantsios, 2001; Martin, 2004; McChesney, 1992; Ross,
1998). When poverty manages to make its way into the media it is usually
played out in a rags to riches narrative that feeds into the myths of
meritocracy, the American dream, and the "pull yourself up by your
bootstraps" ethos. In the end, these types of representation work
to justify class relations by blaming the victim, within these late stages
of capitalism, for having a poor work ethic, being financially irresponsible,
having bad family values, having little interest in education and advancement,
and/or (in some genetic twist) not having the necessary smarts.
4.4
This special issue includes
an analysis of the pedagogical terrain of representation and encourages
theorizing about how culture shapes our sense of political agency and
mediates the relations between everyday class struggles and structures
of power. In order to interrogate dominant discourses, confront the oppressive
values and beliefs that have come to inform mainstream social and political
practices, and continuously forge and work to secure economic and political
rights within the endless antagonisms that feed the ongoing democratic
process, readers of this special issue are encouraged to not only think
about culture politically, but also to think about politics culturally.
As the next two chapters reveal, culture and politics coexist in a symbiotic
relationship in which effective political mobilization can create new
cultural spaces, and such transformative political movements emerge out
of progressive cultural shifts.
4.5 In
"No Carnival Here: Oppressed Youth and Class Relations in City
of God," Valerie Scatamburlo-D'Annibale, Nathalia Jaramillo,
Juha Suoranta, and Peter McLaren first expose the malice and deceit of
neoliberal policies and practices, and argue in favor of the abolition
of capital. They subsequently articulate a position which links critical
cultural studies to a Marxist humanist tradition of revolutionary critical
pedagogy capable of effectively challenging and dismantling the unrestrained
military-industrial-media complex. Through the Brazilian film City
of God the authors argue that critical, dialectical analyses of popular
culture "can undress the deeper political, social, and economic relations
and consequences impacting youth, which may not be obvious at the surface
level of cultural products." Within their dialectical analysis of
youth culture rooted in historical materialism, the authors situate the
lives of youth in Brazilian favelas within a local-global nexus
in order to reveal the contradiction between capital and labor. At the
same time, they provide sign posts into the possibilities and dangers
of youth popular culture.
4.6 Also
concerned with representational politics and rupturing the myth that children's
films are merely entertaining and beyond politics, Robin Truth Goodman,
in her chapter "Harry Potter's Magic and the Market: What are Youth
Learning about Gender, Race, and Class," illustrates how the pedagogical
forces of youth film work to reinforce existing economic, race, and gender
relations which function to oppress.
Conclusion
5.1 In
order to combat this aforementioned long lists of abuses of power, it
is crucial to formulate more inclusive and effective political subjects
and democratizing networks that are able to analyze political moments
and consequently develop critical responses to oppression that have both
local and global dimensions. In order to accomplish this, Julie Webber,
in her contributing and closing chapter of this special issue, "Global
Youth: The Great Divide," argues that the categories used to describe
youth in the global marketplace be rethought "since the conceptual
containers by which we have previously understood their subjectivity,
role in the economy and polity, and relationship to the generations that
mediate access to power and wealth in the world economy have shifted almost
imperceptibly." Webber takes up the growing divisions in world politics
created by neoliberal imperialist policies and practices as they apply
to youth in both the "first" and "third" worlds and
asks the fundamental question: If the nation-state is coming to an end,
what can youth anticipate finding in their future under globalization?
5.2 Rather
than forcing
young people to accept commodified culture as the only legitimate path
to happiness and success, youth should explore and envision different
ways of organizing social relations that can work to restore the centrality
of politics over the tyranny of market forces. In search of "confrontation,"
as Webber puts it, youth need to be encouraged to engage in class analysis.
This praxis of theorizing the world and acting
upon it is crucial if young people wish to take control of their lives
as suggested in the opening quote of this introduction. But not the kind
of control that the sheriff is alluding to—that is, to simply get on the
line when ordered to do so. Rather, the idea is to develop political consciousness
so that youth can differentiate between nation and corporation and global
peace and social justice and the imperatives of profits, and subsequently,
though consciousness comes with no guarantees, forge critical and diverse
coalitions that can fight against all forms of exploitation and oppression.
From here, youth can work to take control of existing disciplinary actions
and security forces, and democratize educational institutions, global
technologies, environmental resources, and media, information, and financial
systems. This kind of solidarity, as opposed to isolated localized efforts,
may present the only way of combating transnational corporations that
no longer need to negotiate with local labor organizations for living
wages and realistic environmental protections or with area-specific human
rights groups—they just go elsewhere, leaving trade restrictions, unemployment,
poverty and political chaos in their path.
5.3 As
guest editor of this special issue it is my hope that the following chapters
will help reveal class conflicts by exploring youth as a category through
which class is lived, and consequently inspire more liberatory social
practices. Unlike a world that can strive to provide social justice for
and harmony among racial, ethnic, religious, sexual, and gender differences,
I can not imagine "class differences without exploitation and domination"
(Meiksins Wood, 1995: 258). The youth of the world can certainly be looked
to as a democratizing force capable of dismantling the structured inequalities
of class-based societies. It is for this very reason that conservatives
and capitalists fear them so and vigilantly work to contain and control
them. In response, critical educators and cultural workers need to rigorously
labor to help youth physically, emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually
break free. The key for young people to take control of their lives is
their solidarity with others in an effort to understand and dismantle
those economic, political, and cultural structures that work to lock them
in silence.
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1
It’s important to note that as of 1998, 1.2 million prisoners were convicted
of nonviolent crimes. In addition, with the spreading of the three strikes
law, people are going to jail for life for stealing golf clubs, food,
etc. Mandatory minimums are also feeding this rapidly expanding industry.
It is also crucial to acknowledge that in this rush to lock people up,
about one-quarter of those people in prison in the U.S. are confined in
local jails and state and federal prisons on drug charges. In federal
prisons, drug offenders now comprise 59 percent of all inmates. In nine
states, over 10 percent of the inmates were indicted on marijuana offenses,
and over 50 percent of those convicted were on charges of possession.
Very few of these prisoners are high-level drug traffickers. In 2000,
according to the Office of National Drug Control Policy, "about two-thirds
of the federal drug budget is allocated to interdiction, law enforcement
and supply reduction efforts. One-third is allocated to prevention, treatment
and demand reduction" (for all of the above statistics, see <http://www.hrw.org/reports/2000/usa/Rcedrg00-03.htm>
10 November 2003).
2
See <http://www.angelfire.com/rnb/y/majority.htm> 12 December 2003.
Author Notes
Pepi Leistyna is an Assistant Professor in the Applied Linguistics Graduate Studies program at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where he coordinates the research program and teaches courses in cultural studies, media analysis, and language acquisition. Speaking internationally on issues of democracy and education, a Fellow of the Education Policy Research Unit, and Associate Editor of the Journal of English Linguistics, Leistyna's books include Breaking Free: The Transformative Power of Critical Pedagogy, Presence of Mind: Education and the Politics of Deception, Defining and Designing Multiculturalism, Corpus Analysis: Language Structure and Language Use, and Cultural Studies: From Theory to Action. I would like to thank E. Wayne Ross for inviting me to put this special issue together and Chris Carter for seeing it through to fruition.
