A Recent History of Anti Racist Struggle in OEA

A Recent History of Antiracist Struggle in the OEA

Racism is at the forefront of union issues in Oakland. In the last 20 years, due to gentrification and broader economic trends, black membership in OEA has fallen from 34% in 1996, to 20% in 2020. Black teachers like Darnisha Wright (who was famously choked by school board member Jumoke Hinton Hodge) are disproportionately fired, put onto PAR, and laid off. The deplorable learning conditions that working class students of color have long experienced in the schools themselves include large class sizes, a hazardously low number of nurses (28 :30,000 students), counselors, and psychologists; high teacher turnover; hazardous or crumbling infrastructure, and displacement through school closures. Over the last 20 years, OUSD has closed 18 public schools. 16 of them were majority-black, which in the context of a racially segregated school system, means their students have the highest needs and are least served. Many of these school buildings are now charter schools, which siphon public resources into the hands of private and corporate interests on the grounds of being an “alternative” education.

Now, over a year into the Covid-19 pandemic, Black and Latino students suffer the highest rates of COVID and have the lowest participation in distance learning. In spite of an OEA-sponsored and newly elected school board, a recent Black Reparations motion with key provisions against school closures has passed at the School Board level only after stripping the bill of its key material provision against school closures.

Every day we hear words from OUSD officials claiming that the district is concerned about diversity, equity, and student success. But the mass divestment of resources from Black student communities speaks for itself. To make change, OEA must develop politics that impact our students and communities materially, not just in words. To do that, we must address oppression within our union through restorative, member-led accountability that is focused on uniting us in the fight against the biggest culprits of white supremacy; the district and billionaire financiers of privatization.

Anti-racism is Material, not Performative

We need look no further than our 2019 strike to see two strong examples of anti-racist politics in action. Tens of thousands in the Oakland community supported our union’s demands for smaller class sizes, more nurses and counselors for students, and a living wage for teachers. Above all, what catalyzed the working class communities of color in East Oakland was the demand against school closures, and specifically the closure of the Roots community school, as shown by the mass turnout for the East Oakland rallies and school board meetings related to the school closure. From the moment the school was declared a “failure” for its low test scores to the moment when it was slated to be closed, Roots became a symbol of the way the district systematically defunds and privatizes Black community institutions, while puppeting the rhetoric of racial justice. In spite of the fact that teachers and families of more privileged neighborhoods will likely never deal with a school closure themselves, these communities were in solidarity with the Deep East flatlands in the demand to “Keep Roots Open”. This is because the education community had the political understanding that the most marginalized sectors of the school community could only be protected with the entire force of the union behind it. More importantly, our union understood that in order to be strong enough to win smaller class sizes and more nurses that we would also need to be strong enough to win the renegade demand to Keep Roots Open.

Another example from the 2019 strike is its conclusion. On the final day of the strike, teachers and community members picketed at the La Escuelita campus where school board members were attempting to meet and vote on $9 million in budget cuts from classified positions, paraeducators, food service workers, and other support staff. These classified coworkers are majority Black and brown, and their union leaders in SEIU and AFSCME were relying on the force of the OEA strike to gain a commensurate wage increase for their workers. If the Board convened the meeting to vote on the cuts before 6pm, it would receive a government incentive. It was a surprise when at 2pm thousands of students marched down the hill to La Escuelita, when at 2pm the board meeting was set to convene, and at 2pm all OEA members received a mass text calling off the pickets because a TA had been reached. However, the vast majority of teachers and community members did not leave the pickets because we understood that if we did, $9 million worth of jobs would be cut from our Black and brown coworkers. We stayed on the pickets ’til 6pm, and no cuts were made that day.

Only Struggle Makes Change

Every time the communities of East Oakland have faced educational hardships, a strong portion of OEA membership has become active and agitated in response — to both the Roots closure and after $9 million in cuts to school budgets were declared by OUSD. And yet in both of these instances, OEA leadership attempted to call off the membership’s activation. Instead of empowering members to defend Oakland’s rights to a non-corrupt, equitable public school system, leadership directed members to “wait” since this is “the best we can do,” claiming that our union is too weak to counter OUSD’s mandates. We have heard these narratives of fear and division before — from the school district. But our experiences of struggle underscore the power our union has when we are united in mass action with other workers and with community members for anti-racist demands: our memberships’ militant mass force was the only thing that postponed these racist attacks in the first place.

Our union has abandoned class struggle: we have done almost no work actions or work stoppages, direct organizing with families, or participation in popular struggles like Black Lives Matter or May Day. Instead, our “engagement” has happened in the form of administrative activities: surveys, empty petitions, individualized e-comments on social media. As a result, since the strike’s conclusion many more schools have been collocated with charters, the district was able to cut $9 million more from classified jobs in a second round of budget cuts, and Black teachers continue to be laid off and fired at disproportionately high rates, and in spite of the global Black Lives Matter uprising of 2020, the newly elected school board gutted the Black Reparations bill of its main material provision (against school closures). Our union is not engaging in class struggle. We have relegated our activities to the electoral and administrative; the survey, the petition, the electronic comment in an elected official’s inbox. Rather than using our collective power as a union to make it happen, we have relied on the charity of professional politicians who are pressured to “do the right thing”, and received watered down outcomes as a result.

The Muscle to Fight Racism

If we want the muscle to fight racism and cultivate pro-Black politics in the Oakland schools, it will take more than OEA’s 48% white members undergoing anti-racism training, and it certainly will not happen by empowering our union’s officials to expel members from the union at their discretion. Not only are these proposed changes a dangerous route for any democratic organization to take, but they exclude our membership from the fight against oppression and relegate this role to a few select individuals, rather than empowering members to hold one another accountable. Of course it is important for all teachers to be trained in anti-racist language and pedagogy so that we do not perpetuate oppressive behaviors towards the majority of our union members and students. However, this will not stop the primary perpetrators of racism: the district, school board, and the billionaires who fund privatization and divestment from public education under the guise of anti-racism. As OEA members, we want more than to be anti-racist in our classroom pedagogy and our interpersonal interactions. We must fight for the material conditions that allow our students and their families to thrive.

The Conversation on Race in the OEA

FIrst to frame the context. Empirically for at least the last decade black teachers are the most disciplined and remediated group of teachers in OUSD. Quantitatively and qualitatively black teachers are the most scrutinized, most likely to be questioned on competence and most likely to be silenced. This state of affairs is consistent whether or not the Superintendent is black or white.

Our union and all union members should take any charges of racism very seriously and scrutinize them closely. Just as an organization should seriously investigate allegations of sexism in order to respect survivors, so too should we examine charges of racism in order to respect the majority of our members and students. Unfortunately, the OEA conversation on race in the last year has not been in the service of educating members on race issues, of organizing to proactively fight against structural racism our students experience, or of encouraging members of color to participate in union spaces. Often, the dialogue around race has been used to suppress member activism (including members of color) and to maintain the failed model of “partnering” with management supported by the CTA (OEA’s more conservative parent union). The conversation on racism has also grown internally in the OEA in the recent months. In Rep Councils and semi-public union meetings, we have witnessed callouts of union members that more closely resemble Twitter rants than a structured conversation on race and accountability.

The most pressing problem in the OEA is that by and large our membership of ~2500 are uninformed and disengaged. Many are outright turned off by the way our 2019 strike, contract negotiations, and Rep Councils have been handled. Union membership has declined in the last two years. A conversation on race that is focused solely on individual white people and the moral authority of our elected officers as judges, is a wrong approach that has a negative impact on members and on anti-racist struggle. Women and members of color are especially negatively impacted by this, because they face higher barriers to participating in union activism from the start. On top of dealing with emotional and reproductive labor, now women and especially women of color in our union face the pressure of receiving public callouts, personal attacks in meetings, aggressive late night phone calls pressuring members for quid pro quo, and being tone-policed (or outright “muted”) for commenting too passionately in a meeting.

adrienne maree brown, author, doula, and Black feminist invites us to “get excellent at being in conflict, which is a healthy, natural part of being human and biodiverse.” There will always be dissonance in movements, but it does not always need to be understood “through a lens of violence, abuse, and victimization.” We will never end systematic patterns of harm by “isolating and picking off individuals…we need to flood the entire system with life-affirming principles and practices, to clear the channels between us of the toxicity of supremacy, to heal from the harms of a legacy of devaluing some lives and needs in order to indulge others.” (We Will Not Cancel Us, AK Press 2021, p.8, p.26) People of color and their work are erased from activist spaces that are wholesale declared as “white spaces”, or they are accused of being in league with “white supremacy” for participating in those spaces. The other side of this is that some people of color in our union become tokenized or evoked on behalf of a political argument.

None of this is to say that sexism and racism do not happen in our union spaces, or that addressing oppressive behaviors are counterproductive to union activism. On the contrary, fighting oppression is a first step for creating a high participation union where membership of color and women/LGBT people feel empowered to lead. That means accountability for all union members and officers. The goal is to bring transformative justice to life within the movement space, outside the mechanisms of the state; to be in “right relationship” with each other, so that we can effectively organize as a collective mass.

OEA must build conflict resolution and anti-oppression practices

Now more urgently than ever, our union needs to transform into the incredible force that we glimpsed in 2019. That means we should be looking to increase the participation of all members by providing meaningful opportunities for people to participate, and ensure that oppressive behaviors from anyone do not go unchecked, no matter what “side” they’re coming from. Whether it’s perceived disrespect, silencing, verbal bullying, micro-aggressions, or dragging in the chat, we can’t let it prevent our union from engaging in collective anti-racist struggle. These punitive practices destroy the social fabric of our community and echo the state’s carceral tendencies.

That means that when oppressive behaviors or conflicts happen, as they inevitably will, we must practice “accountability beyond punishment” with each other (brown, p. 10). Instead, members and officers must engage in conflict resolution with a member-mediator with a restorative intention. Unless people are truly unwilling to change their oppressive behaviors, we cannot afford to lose them from the fight for our students material conditions. We need everyone, just like Roots needed the whole community, and like our students need us now to fight the continued divestment in a time where nurses and class sizes are a matter of life and death. As Adrienne Maree brown affirms, creating an abolitionist union means being a community committed to growth, and practicing a “healing and transformative iteration of justice.”

Most of us are not trained union activists, but we have all been schooled in the racist, sexist, homophobic norms of our society. That means these oppressive behaviors are very likely to show up in our organization and will make it more difficult for people of color, women, and LGBT folks to participate. We urgently need to address oppression in order to have a more democratic union and to move towards an “organizing model” instead of a “service model”.[X]

An organizing model means the plans and policies of our union will be driven not by the paid union officialdom, but by sites, clusters, and Rep Councils. For this to happen, we actually need a culture where political discussion and debate can happen safely and not devolve into personal attacks. Currently, almost all plans and policies are set by the elected officers and handed down through the Cluster system, with participation from membership limited to petitions and surveys.

We can immediately make our site meetings, clusters, and Rep Councils less oppressive by adopting simple practices, which some of our union’s organizing spaces have already begun to model:

• Openly cultivating the leadership of people of color and women activists by inviting them to meetings, asking for their thoughts, and following up with them after meetings
• The use of progressive stack
• The use of time limits on speaking turns
• Facilitators mindfully checking in with the group to see if any people who haven’t spoken would like to get on stack
• Making sure that when a coworker offers an idea it is recognized as an actionable proposal to be discussed (i.e. not just glossed over as nice words)
• Using democratic voting when clear consensus is not reached
• Setting community agreements around accountability for harmful words and actions
• Rotating roles and sharing follow-up tasks equally between members (note taking, facilitating, keeping stack)
• Using the chat to offer points of information, ask clarifying questions, share links, make simple comments or affirmations, not as a platform to attack and debase coworkers
• Transformative accountability when oppressive behaviors or mistakes happen: if an issue cannot be easily resolved between two members, ask for support from an impartial mediator, or possibly establish an “accountability commission” of elected union members.
• Respond not with rejection, exile or public shaming, but with clear naming of harm; education around intention, impact, and pattern breaking
• Satisfying apologies and consequences (see Mia Mingus’ “The Four Parts of Accountability: How to Give a Good Apology.”

Canceling people or removing people from a community in order to reduce harm and violence may sometimes indeed be necessary, but each cancellation is a failure in accountability. Expelling members from our union should be an absolute last resort, for repeat offenders who refuse to change their ways, or egregious acts of oppression. Most importantly, regular members should be the ones to decide how to hold one another accountable, not officers on full release, whose salaries are tied to their continuous re-election. Every coworker we cannot bring into the anti-racist struggle is a person lost from our ranks. Within our union, we have different experiences and different political opinions; clarifying these differences through healthy debate will actually make us a stronger union. We must be careful not to escalate our conflicts and interpersonal disagreements into the language and response of abuse. Creating a space of solidarity and welcome is necessary if we are to attract new members, activists, and community members, who know that they will be valued by our union despite their human flaws, and will also be pushed to grow beyond them.

On White Privilege

We start with the taking on the Thesis of “unconscious bias.” Conceptually this refers to the associations that are made between different qualities and social categories such race, gender or disability and are judgements that are made without conscious awareness. For example you look like this, so you must think and feel like this.. Counterpose that to “explicit bias” in which the person is very clear about his or her feelings and attitudes, and related behaviors are conducted with intent. In a public education setting, this can play out with teachers saying “black students should be in special education.” “Black people are good at entertainment and so forth.” In this paradigm white privilege allows a cognitive dissonance in which the unconscious gives the get out of jail pass to the “i’m sorry I didn’t know.” On the explicit side the crime of insult, the assault can be dismissed in a retreat to the cave of white privilege. This privilege manifests back to the protection of relative job security, relative safety from police brutality, relative safety from being deemed dishonest, and validation that society values you. We demand our white colleagues acknowledge this privilege and don’t pretend it doesn’t exist. However it does not mean we want our white colleagues to be “seen and not heard.” OEA suffers from the calamity of “or” rather than “and.” It is in the “and” that we find common ground and build a stronger union.

The Silver Lining

On April 16, 2021, the members of OEA voted 95% in favor of a Vote of No Confidence against the Administration of OUSD regarding provisions of the reopening. On this matter OEA spoke in one voice and in unison. Going back in recent history OEA authorized a strike in February of 2019 with 95%, also with 95% approval. In summary, OEA needs to heal from the inside and restore the integrity, solidarity and camaraderie amongst our members. The pandemic was hard on our teachers, families and community, this can not be understated. OEA needs to implement, restorative justice practices, health and wellness access, and develop a new praxis of how to engage each other.

Post Script

Since this article was written sadly the operational structure and race relations have deteriorated to an even worse degree. The OEA leadership has made it clear that the politics of “harmonious labor relations” is more important than the rights of members despite the dubious acts of OUSD administration. (substitute arbitration) The OEA leadership has decided that “fighting the bosses” is off limits and instead prefers to focus on co worker social, racial, and race first narratives. To be more specific the OEA leadership has made a policy that focussing on racial, social and philosophical differences inside OEA, is paramount over fighting the OUSD administration that can arbitrarily discipline and take away our economic livelihood.

In addition, the OEA leadership uses tools such as “conscious and subconscious white guilt”, gas lighting and other tools to silence white voices who have legitimate concerns regarding their material working conditions. The white voices the OEA leadership has managed to “co-opt” are then used as tools and cover to hide the leadership’s collaboration and subordination with the bosses against the interest of the members of OEA. It’s called bad racial/black politics. (See Pascal Roberts on black politics the politics of capture https://twitter.com/probert06/status/1423682834246549511?s=20)

This needs to be called out for what it is. For example just last year the First Vice President called two caucasian OEA members in good standing “white supremacist.” Perhaps the First Vice President should apologize and be held accountable….

OEA will go through trials and tribulations to return to its stated purpose of serving the students and community of Oakland.

Written By Brian Crowell (black teacher) and others.