Hello bloggies and bloggets,
Despite Los Angeles being one of the lamer cities to be in, there is one guarantee that makes being here worth it: the young people. Anywhere you find a large group of young minorities in Los Angeles, it is almost guaranteed that they are not too far from some form of activism.
I was with one of my friends the other day and saw his button:
Calling out state school systems in California has always been intriguing, so I did a little more research on the button. Turns out that this little jem of social commentary is not just a trendy fashion piece, it is a mass-response to the increased amount of police in and around LAUSD schools. Protests have been made, demand sheets have been drafted, and progress is promised. These young people are angry, and they are organized.
It is a fact that the graduation rate at many of the high schools in Los Angeles County is less than 50%. The probability of a young adult getting in trouble with the law increases exponentially if they do not finish high school. Correlating those two ideas might be the grounds on which police persons infiltrate educational facilities. However, it could be that those facts are true because of the large amount of police at the schools. There has been a report stating that in some schools if a student is late to class, they receive a fine of a couple hundred dollars that is enforced by the police. If they come to school in loose or baggy clothing they will more likely than not end of on a police officer’s list of gang affiliated youth (such lists have a history of being prejudice and serve as a way for the law to profile youth by superficial images. If anything were to happen with someone on the list-even a petty crime- their punishment is increased, even if it is the first mark on their record).
Slowly but surely, the United States is embedding youth of color into a systematic oppression like no other. Sure there are no blatant laws excluding them from upward mobility, but there are many road blocks, obstacles, and deterrents. The defeatist attitude common in minority high school students does not come from a racial distinction between one who is lazy and one who is hard working- it is the armor needed to handle the injustices faced on a day-to-day basis. It is a front for the kid in class that has been told by the pigs “I’m watchin’ you boy- I can tell your going to cause trouble” before the school year even starts. Psychologically speaking, in environments where you are made to feel worthless, it is instinctive and almost necessary to stop caring. Caring opens a venue to be hurt and affected even more by those who are against you. If there were most schools where the students were surrounded by those who supported them rather than doubted them things would be a lot different.
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