“The science teacher from 2003 who taught you to be proud of your heritage, where are they?” by New Orleans Youth

Note: This article was written by New Orleans young people. See another opinion piece by the students at this link.

Early Friday morning students arrived at their schools only to find that it was no regular morning. Pasted on the walls all around the schools were large black & white posters. But these were not your typical posters. These posters had facts, questions, and statistics regarding New Orleans public charter schools and their inhabitants -- former students, teachers, principals, and CEOs. Some posters had questions on them that referenced the firing of over 7,000 teachers post-Katrina: "The black math teacher from 2004 who lived in your neighborhood, where are they?" And some questioned the salaries of school principals and administrators compared to the quality of the schools they run: “Your principal makes $100,000 a year, but why is your school only a ‘D’ school?” These are only a few of the many posters that were found at several high schools across the New Orleans area, including Lake Area, Sci Academy, Warren Easton, and Landry Walker.

Students at these schools and others had a lot to say about the posters and the questions they posed.  Responding to the question, “Your homie from the class of 2013...where are they now?” one high school student answered, “Most of the people I knew in the class of 2013 are currently in college, or didn’t finish and plan to go back this year. That makes me anxious and worry about if I can finish college when I’m ‘supposed’ to and wonder what happened to throw them off track. It makes me feel sad that people go into college unsure of their main drive and because of being rushed into it, they lose track of what they really want.”

Another student nearby answered as well saying, “Most of them are still in college but a few are struggling to have somewhere to stay and are still trying to get into college. They have no choice but to get a job, and their job is weighing on them and keeping them from going to school.”

At another local high school a student responded by saying, “My friend is currently working at Papa John’s, and it’s sad especially because he is now struggling and on the verge of giving up.” One student candidly said, “I don’t know where they are, and I feel some type of way because of their disappearance.” One final student gave a chilling answer, “Probably dead to be honest.”

Over at a high school on the West Bank students responded to several questions that were on posters around their school. Responding to, “How many teachers live in your neighborhood?” A student answered, “None. I feel disappointed because the teachers come from all over and they don’t know what the people from my neighborhood are going through.”

Other questions centered around how students get exposed to black culture in their schools. Two of them included, “The principal who taught you the black national anthem, what happened to them?” and “The science teacher from 2003 who taught you to be proud of your heritage, where are they?”

The first student answered, “It’s like a crime to teach your truth and your history, because if it wasn’t they wouldn’t have been fired and white people wouldn’t be the main ones teaching in our schools. There’s only a certain time for us to talk about black people in schools — February.”

And the other said, “I don’t even know what the Black National Anthem is, which makes me sad because it shows what type of schools I went to. The fact that I live in Louisiana and don’t know the Black National Anthem puts things into perspective for me.”

While the last student responded, “Well, that school doesn’t even have the same name any more. It’s charter school now, everything has changed — new principal, new teachers, new uniforms, new name. I don’t even know what happened to those teachers. When the school changed and those charter people came, they had to go. And that was the only school that I went to where I learned the Black National Anthem.” (The school was George Washington Carver, now it’s Carver Collegiate.)

One student talked in-depth about how the posters forced them to reflect on their place as youth in New Orleans. “After seeing the different posters at my school, it really made me think about how black youth don't really matter to this city, or that we do matter but only for the use of others. Schools and the entire city really just use us to pass off statistics to the rest of the world to say that the city is doing better. It’s like if we’re getting higher scores on tests than New Orleans must be moving forward...but it's not.”

Maybe the point of these posters is to raise questions about where the city really is 10 years after hurricane Katrina. A high school senior from New Orleans East seems to have summed up the feelings of their peers and families regarding the cruel irony of the anniversary festivities. “Our city's leaders are celebrating the anniversary of Katrina, and saying that if not for a terrible storm that killed so many people and hurt so many families we wouldn't have been able to move forward. Which implies that the way the city was before, and the things that happened before Katrina were wrong. All without acknowledging the damage that some of these ‘positive’ changes have caused our city.”

-written by New Orleans Youth

#k10truth4youth

#whywefight

"All McDonough schools were founded by money made directly from slave labor" by New Orleans Youth

Note: This article was written by New Orleans young people. See another opinion piece by the students at this link.

As the ten year commemoration of Hurricane Katrina approaches, the city of New Orleans is filled with high energy from the life-long residents of the city. The New Orlenians that have seen the good and bad that this city has to offer. There has been plenty of conversation in the city about whether or not the people feel like New Orleans has fully recovered from hurricane Katrina. On this Friday morning as students were arriving to school, they were surprised to see a yard full of signs reading:

All McDonough schools were founded by money made directly from slave labor

Your principal makes over $90,000 a year , but why is your school a “F” school?

How many of your teachers live in your neighborhood?

If you feel like a prisoner in your school, ask your teacher “why”

Your homies from class of 2013. . . where are they now?

The black math teacher from 2004 who lived in your neighborhood, where are they?

The science teacher from 2003 who taught you to be proud of your heritage, where are they?

The principal who taught you the black national anthem, what happened to them?

New Beginnings Schools Foundation runs Lake Area.  Their CEO makes $140,000 a year, but why is your school only a “D” school?

At a time like this when the city is highly anticipating the commemoration of Hurricane Katrina, the youth of New Orleans boldly decided to use artful expression to speak up about how they feel. Directly addressing the farce of better schools and improving education in the city of New Orleans that has been portrayed by the media. This is a method that I agree with completely. The youth has been blatantly ignored by the media and by the city of New Orleans when it comes to listening to their opinion of why the crime rate is so high, why there is a lack of opportunity in the city for youth of color and why the city is not better off now than it was ten years ago. In fact the city is worse off than it was ten years ago especially in terms of education.

Before you believe the hype that surrounds the 10^th Anniversary, try to think of the names of all the teachers who were unjustly fired right after the storm.   And try to think of the names of all the students who’ve been pushed out of schools because of racist and unfair discipline policies.  When you think of what it means to have a real education system that encourages critical thought and self-discovery, try to think of names.  Not data points.   And if the names don’t come to you, maybe you should ask yourselves why they’ve been erased. 

That’s what young people have done with their art.  They’re asking questions and demanding answers.  This reaction from the youth represents a bold statement in the face of anyone who is now saying that the city of New Orleans has recovered from hurricane Katrina and the corruption that followed in the midst of hurricane Katrina.  As the hashtag at the bottom of the posters says, this is #whywefight.

-written by New Orleans Youth

#k10truth4youth

#whywefight

This is Not Theoretical: Reflecting on a Recent Visit to Louisiana State Penitentiary, By Nicky Gillies

Reposted from our friends at The Oyster Knife.

This piece was written after guest contributor Nicky Gillies participated in the NOLA to Angola bike ride, a fundraiser for the Cornerstone Builders’ Bus Project, which helps people in Louisiana travel to visit their incarcerated loved ones. 

This October I spent three days pushing through the 160 winding bike miles from my home in New Orleans to Louisiana State Penitentiary, known as Angola.  It is still a functioning plantation, much as it has been since the time of slavery.  Angola spreads across 18,000 acres of lauded farmland tucked into a bend in the Mississippi River.  Roughly 5,000 people live and work and eat and sleep and write and shit and dream and shower there, not counting the employees.  Most of those 5,000 people are Black men, young and old, and the vast majority of them—almost 90%—will die inside barbed wire.

Intellectual discussions of the 13th amendment and years of participating in prison-related organizing did not prepare me for the heartbreak and outrage of seeing farmland that is still tilled by a captive and almost 80% Black population.  This is not an antiquated system.  Slavery is contemporary, although it has been refashioned several times, and prison labor is integral to the US economy.  Activist lawyer and former prisoner Paul Wright wrote that simultaneously removing over 2 million incarcerated people from the work force and employing another million as guards “is the most thoroughly implemented government work program in American history since the New Deal.”  Knowing this, seeing Angola—endless barbed wire and guard towers and prison uniforms and eerily beautiful fields stretching in all directions—is devastating.  It is an atrocity.  It is also mundane.

Here are things I saw and learned:  The warden uses dogs bred with wolves to guard prisoners and chase them down, and has even recruited dogs in the area that were supposed to be euthanized for aggression to work in the prison.  There is a golf course in Angola.  You can tee-off there for twenty dollars.  The prisoners manufacture the coffins used when someone passes away inside, which happens on average 32 times each year.  An inmate is paroled and walks out the gates to the free world an average of only 4 times a year.  There are 18,000 acres where cotton is grown.  The operating budget is one hundred million dollars.  The prison museum keeps an old electric chair on display, as if the state no longer murders people, as if this was a fleeting oddity.  And then there’s the rodeo, which was happening the day of our visit.

We blow past several miles of backed up cars waiting to enter through the first set of gates.  A mass of smelly kids on bikes, we press into the surge of 10,000 people there to see the rodeo.  The rodeo has been running since the 1960s, and at $5 per person to enter the inner gates and $15 per person to get rodeo tickets, it brings in an enormous profit for Warden Burl Cain each October.  (Angola proudly calls itself a self-sustaining prison, meaning that its profits—mostly extracted from an exploited labor force—cover its operating costs.)  The rodeo is quite dangerous.  Some events require significant skill and others are designed to humiliate the participants.  Prisoners compete to win extra visitation hours and cash prizes.  The rodeo also features a “crafts fair” where prisoners can sell things they’ve produced and keep about 80% of the profit.  This money can only be spent in the prison—phone calls, soap, cigarettes, underground purchases from guards, etc.

We approach the gates to the rodeo, but cannot bring ourselves to hand over $5 for a closer look.  Instead we wander the perimeter and stare: children jumping on the bounce house next to the guard tower, families excited and laughing and shouting across the crowd, the fake trolley bus that laps the parking lot to transport visitors, the prisoners in their uniforms staffing the event, the hotdog stand, the barbed wire, the guards, the guns.  I wonder how many generations have died inside these gates.  I also wonder why anyone would bring their children to a prison for fun on a gorgeous Louisiana October Sunday.  What does this teach them?  Some in the crowd are probably rushing to see their incarcerated loved ones.  But many, many more of them are shoving through the gates to get good seats.  I pass a white woman walking away from her parked car, yapping into her phone and scanning the crowd for whoever she plans to meet.  “This is a nightmare,” she says, exasperated.  She means the fucking parking.

This is a nightmare.  Named for the country where the original group of enslaved Africans were abducted from when this land first became a plantation, Angola used to be known as the bloodiest prison in America.  The particulars of its atrocious conditions are widely known, documented, and criticized, and must absolutely be reformed.  But narratives of imprisonment often fixate on the sensationalized details—the wrongly accused, the exonerated, the most extreme of inhumane conditions, the gruesome executions gone wrong.  These things matter, but that story is one of exceptions.  How many hours does it take to exonerate one innocent person?  How many lawyers?  And how much media attention?  And the right hand of how many governors?

What about those who are guilty of their charges?  It is morally convenient to assume that they are monsters who deserve to be locked away from society.  But mass incarceration in the US is a recent and economically-driven trend; it does not have to be this way.  If we refuse to accept that over 2 million people are beyond help, and if true safety is rooted in access to living-wage jobs, better schools, counseling, drug treatment, childcare, mediation, intergenerational mentorship, and safe places to live and play, what a great responsibility we then bear.  This is what most fundamentally disturbs me:  We incarcerate the largest percentage of our population of any nation in the world.  The vast majority of people inside prisons are non-violent offenders.  Penal work camps are widely accepted as a logical solution to crime.

We sit outside the rodeo and watch the crowd and I try to burn everything into my cells—what it is to be literally and physically free, what it is to see people living in cages, what it is to have no family inside this or any prison, to have never before schlepped out to visit someone I loved and couldn’t even touch, what it is to witness all this and strive to live a just life.  I pedal slowly back out of Angola past manicured marigolds (prison labor) and stashes of extra barbed wire.  We congregate in the shade of the tiny post-office nearby.  Someone has brought half-eaten funnel cake back from the rodeo.  My friend casually laughs that she almost waltzed into the prison with two joints in her bag.  I wonder how many of these inmates were once kids who forgot to take the joints out of their pockets.

What purpose does it serve for these 5,000 people to be in Angola?  We have long abandoned the notion of rehabilitation for those imprisoned in this country.  Locking up poor people and people of color in the south has never been a means to help offenders re-enter society, but was instead a solution to the economic crisis when the chattel slavery system was declared (mostly) illegal.  But slavery remains explicitly legal as punishment for a crime.  This is not theoretical.  It’s 160 winding bike miles from my house.  It’s the children and parents and cousins and lovers of my neighbors and co-workers and of my political community.  Notably, it’s not my close friends.  The statistical impossibility of having lived in this hyper-policed city with the highest per capita incarceration rate in the world for six years without anyone close to me getting locked up is only explained by whiteness and class privilege.

We arrive back in New Orleans, hug, and gather damp tents.  With aching legs I push through the five miles back to my house—five miles now seems like a short flight of stairs or a deep breath.  Flashing blue lights up the Treme and St. Claude Avenue, where I have never once been pulled over despite joints in cars and loud, tipsy bike rides and lots of sober speeding to work and yes that one time we all peed in the gutter when we were lost and drunk and nineteen.  Behind Armstrong Park, I see a young man pressed into a NOPD car.  I hear the cinch of metal cuffs as my wheels clatter past him across raggedy pavement.  I wonder if his white undershirt is hanes like mine and if he has a toddler who pulls on his ears and I wonder if his mom will call his cellphone over and over until she thinks to check the Orleans Parish Prison docket online.  I wonder if he will pick cotton until he fucking dies.  I do not want this world–I did not make it, but it sure as hell made me.  Now the question is can we unmake each other.

I hope that if by the grace of the universe I grow old, the small children I treasure now will become adults who are ashamed that I lived less than 200 miles from this sprawling prison farm camp and did very little.  That I averted my eyes and paid my bills and breathed shallowly and claimed not to smell it upwind of my home, upriver of my life.  I do not want them to know a world where young people are plucked out of difficult and violent circumstances to work until their untimely death behind bars.  I want to make them something better.

Nicky Gillies moved to New Orleans in 2007, works as an ASL interpreter, and strives to learn how to accountably organize against the Prison Industrial Complex and live in a just way.

VAYLA Press Conference: Six Public High Schools, Six Years After the Storm, 450 Student Voices from Inside New Orleans Educational Experiment

From the Vietnamese American Young Leaders Association of New Orleans (VAYLA):
About 18 months ago, students began to examine conditions in six public high schools, embarking on the most extensive, youth-led evaluation of New Orleans schools since Hurricane Katrina.

In total, we have gathered 50 hours of testimony and 25,000 survey responses, engaging over 450 students. We will be hosting a press conference to release our report to the public. Come hear what is happening in schools from the students themselves.

Six Public High Schools, Six Years After the Storm
Wednesday, Sept. 7 at 3:30 p.m.
New Orleans Main Library
3rd Floor Auditorium
219 Loyola Ave., New Orleans, LA 70112
For more information:
504.253.6000 or ryhc@vayla-no.org

Sixth Grader Handcuffed at Elementary/Middle School in Shreveport

From our friends at ACLU of Louisiana:

Today the ACLU of Louisiana requested records from the Caddo Parish School Board and Walnut Hill Elementary/Middle School, seeking information about handcuffing children at school. Acting in response to the handcuffing of a sixth grader four days after the child was hit by another student at the school bus stop, the ACLU wants to know why the child was handcuffed by the police at school, and why police action was taken days after the child was a victim of an attack by another student.

“School discipline problems should be resolved by school disciplinarians, not by turning a child into a criminal,” said Marjorie R. Esman, Executive Director of the ACLU of Louisiana. “A sixth grader is a child, not an adult. The police have no business enforcing rules of an elementary school, and schools have no business involving law enforcement in disciplinary matters.”

In this case, the child was ordered to the principal's office at Walnut Hill four days after he was assaulted, where he was greeted by the police who led him, in handcuffs, to his grandmother's car. “The only possible justification for the handcuffs was to humiliate or frighten the child, which is an abuse of law enforcement authority,” continued Esman.

In its public records requests to Walnut Hill and the Caddo Parish School Board, the ACLU seeks information about other incidents of handcuffing within the past two years, as well as copies of agreements with the Shreveport Police Department. “We want to know how often children are handcuffed at school,” said Esman.

On December 22, 2010 the ACLU requested documents from the Shreveport Police Department seeking its records of similar agreements and practices. Those documents have not yet been received.

Copies of the public records requests can be found here:

To Walnut Hill School.

To Caddo Parish School Board.

To Shreveport Police Department.

New Report Shines a Light on LGBT Youth in the Louisiana Juvenile Justice System

By Wesley Ware, Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana

Visiting incarcerated youth in Louisiana, I am used to hearing bleak stories about young people who struggle daily with isolation, despair, and a lack of support. They come from every corner of the state and are housed together in all-male secure facilities. Intended to "rehabilitate" troubled young men, sometimes these placements do little more than warehouse them.

On my way home from a prison visit, I can usually shake the horrors these young people tell me and use their stories and the inspiration I receive from them to push for larger juvenile justice reform. However, there are some youth whose experiences are harder for me to leave behind, and haunt me long after I have left the prison walls.

Sitting in a youth prison across from a young man I've known for over three years, he finally tells me he often struggles with feelings for other young men. He tells me he thinks there's a word for it, "Bisexual?" He says he hears that there are places in the world where gender and sexuality aren't policed with violence; where people are able to be themselves and that it's ok if you feel this way. But having been housed in a youth prison for the past several years where he witnessed violence, abuse, and even the death of another young man inside the facility, he is unable to imagine such a place where looking at another man wouldn't result in a broken bone.

A new report released by the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana (JJPL), Locked Up & Out, shares the stories of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender youth confined in youth prisons across Louisiana. One youth tells the story of being raped in a youth prison, attempting suicide, and having to fight every day for his safety. Another transgender youth says that she is subjected to constant verbal abuse and harassment from staff.

Recent studies show that an alarming 15% of youth held in juvenile detention centers across the country are lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender. Multiple factors lead these kids into the juvenile justice system, from family rejection or school harassment to homelessness and substance abuse. Further, 80% of youth in juvenile prisons in Louisiana are African American, showing another alarming disparity.

Once inside the walls of the juvenile justice system, LGBT youth often face extreme physical, sexual, and psychological abuse and harassment as well as additional barriers to their release.

Louisiana, a state that previously housed one of the most brutal youth prisons in the country, is known now for its progress transforming the juvenile system into one that rehabilitates youth and seeks to hold them in community-based alternatives to incarceration. However, there is still a long way to go and LGBT youth in the system, often invisible, have been left behind to bear the brunt of a system still in repair.

A 2009 survey of LGBT youth across the country (conducted by the New York organization FIERCE) showed that youth ranked issues that are known feeders into the juvenile justice system as higher priorities than other issues facing them, such as marriage equality. Among the highest ranked issues facing LGBT youth were homelessness, mental health, access to social support services, school safety issues, and police harassment and abuse. While the survey included youth from Georgia, Texas, and South Carolina, it was conducted with little representation from Deep South states (such as Louisiana or Mississippi) as there are virtually no LGBT youth-specific organizations in these areas for surveyors to poll.

However, we can assume that youth in the Deep South region share the same concerns as other youth, possibly even magnified in rural areas where youth have little to no access to LGBT advocacy organizations, peer support groups, or social services competent and equipped to handle the unique issues often faced by LGBT youth. This may be an additional reason that LGBT youth in Louisiana appear to be making up such a disproportionate percentage of youth in juvenile prison.

As LGBT advocates fight for marriage equality, military inclusion, and other issues, we can't forget the plight of LGBT youth who are being funneled into the deep end of the juvenile justice system. While Locked Up & Out focuses on steps Louisiana can take to reform the juvenile justice system for LGBT youth, there are many things LGBT organizations and individuals can do nationwide.

LGBT advocacy organizations should consider expanding their issue base to include tackling those systems which have had a disproportionately negative affect on LGBT youth. LGBT organizations should consider not only engaging with other progressive or social justice organizations (such as those doing juvenile justice reform) to improve conditions in secure facilities that house youth, but also consider ways to engage "at-risk" LGBT young people before they are funneled into the system. In fact, it could be argued that one of the most crucial things LGBT organizations could do as a movement is fight for justice for those at the very bottom, incarcerated LGBT youth in Louisiana, a state known for its legacy of racism as well as discrimination against LGBT people.

Back at the youth prison, the young man across from me tells me he'd really like someone to talk to about all of the confusing, mixed feelings he has. And as a young man who is confined in a secure facility that is supposed to provide him with counseling and programming for his rehabilitation, why shouldn't he be able to talk to someone about this normal part of adolescent development, too?

I ask him if he plans on telling anyone else that he's bisexual. Looking down at the floor, he tells me that while he's tired of hiding, he's afraid someone would kill him if they ever found out; but he'd commit suicide before that could happen anyway. He looks up at me with a desperate face that reminds me, despite all of his struggles, he's still just a kid. He says, "Death before dishonor, ya know?"

The report Locked Up & Out can be downloaded from the JJPL website.

Wesley Ware has been advocating for the rights of incarcerated youth and the creation of community-based alternatives to incarceration since he came to the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana (JJPL) in 2007. He also serves on the Advisory Committee for the Equity Project, a national initiative to ensure that LGBT youth in juvenile delinquency courts are treated with dignity, respect, and fairness.

This report originally appeared on bilerico.com.

Photo by Abdul Aziz.