 All right, good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for making it all the way to the third of today's panel. I really appreciate y'all being there. My name is Aaron Nofke, and I'm a Millennial Fellow here at New America. And I'm also the editorial assistant for the Poor People's Campaign, a national call for moral revival. And so today, I'll be introducing our two panelists, as well as saying a few words about what the panel will seek to address. So this title of the panel is Policy Engagement and Political Activism. And our goal today is to communicate the significance and distinction of youth activism and to learn how political organizations can better serve to empower young people. And I think this discussion seems timely given the wave of media attention that young activists, especially Parkland students, have received in the past month. But rather than approach the concept of youth activism as an inherently progressive or transformative force, it is perhaps more valuable to think of young people as a cohort shaped by laws, institutions, and political events that have transpired in their lifetimes. So for example, when asked to comment on why white supremacy is theorized as permanent in many leftist circles, Professor Kianga Yamada Taylor said, to me, the answer is simple. We have not had a successful social movement in this country in two generations. And the labor movement, the working class movement, is almost non-existent in its form as labor. Professor Taylor's comments can be instructive for how the political activity of young people is historically grounded, why surges of youth activism might transpire around certain issues and not for others, and why specific organizational structures and ideological positions gain popularity. And rather than understand youth activists as a singular sort of stable constituency, it's also important to take into account the divergences within generations along lines of social identification and lived experience. Nevertheless, young people organizing together and leading in politics has, in its most profound moments, resulted in new models for organizing and has brought forward extraordinary political victories. So here I'm reminded of the formation of the Black Panther Party at Merritt College and the political victories of young workers who organized the Flint sit-down strikes in 1936. And so with this in mind, building out the political infrastructure to sustain and foster youth empowerment ought to be an imperative for movement building. And to understand how this has historically been achieved, as well as to discuss current limits and opportunities for centering young people in political activism, I turn it over to our panelists today. And so the first person I'd like to introduce is Dr. Marcia Chatlin, a Provost Distinguished Associate Professor of History and African-American Studies at Georgetown University and a New America Fellow. Dr. Chatlin is a historian of Black girls and girlhood during the Great Migration. Her first book, Southside Girls, Growing Up in the Great Migration, was published by Duke University Press in 2015. She's also written on Black Lives Matter and its historical trajectory, as well as the role of Black women in racial justice movements. She's currently writing a book about race and fast food titled From Sit-In to Drive Through Black America and the Age of Fast Food. And our second panelist today is Joseph Green. He's the director of youth programs at Split This Rock. It's a DC-based poetry organization that promotes social change and youth empowerment through the arts. Merging activism with poetry, Joseph has co-founded dozens of after-school creative writing programs and poetry festivals across the country, including the Hyper Bowl, which is the largest poetry slam for high school students in the mid-Atlantic region. In addition to his work with young people, Joseph is a nationally recognized poet and public speaker. And so with that, let me turn it over to our moderator today, Christian Hosam. Christian is a Millennial Fellow, and he works with the political reform team here at New America. All right, so thank you, everyone, for being here. It's so exciting to do this part of the day just to kick it off because what we thought about as a cohort when we were deciding on doing these panels was the panel after this is going to talk about activism in a more grounded, practical way. We wanted to take a step back before that and talk about some of the myths and realities when it comes to youth activism. And it's so interesting and exciting to be here because there's so much going on, particularly around what we might call youth activism right now, particularly around Parkland, but not limited to Parkland. And I think that's actually where I might start. So, you know, in your intro, Erin, you talked about, you know, the quote by Dr. Taylor, Ke'an Yama Taylor, about, you know, how young people, we've not experienced a successful social movement for the last two generations. But that doesn't mean that we have not seen powerful displays of protest, of organizing, of consciousness raising, and I'm thinking in particular of Black Lives Matter. So for the first question, I'd like us to maybe reflect on how BLM kind of emerges as a bellwether for the political class of young people in this moment, and how the movement does or does not affect how we're thinking about what we mean by models of organizing. So, Marcia, I'm wondering if we can maybe start with you and then kind of talk a little bit in depth about that. Yeah, thank you. And Erin, what beautiful comments. What a wonderful, you know, framing narrative. So, you know, when I think about Black Lives Matter, I think of it, I think we think of it as a protest movement, which it is, but I think we also have to think about it as a method, as a way of getting at a series of questions. And when we do that, I think it helps us understand the parts of it that are particularly attentive to the ways that young people interact with kind of larger political systems. And so when we kind of, you know, boil it down to its most basic history, you know, Black Lives Matter emerges around the death of Trayvon Martin in a kind of local way in which a local issue is able to amplify a national problem around gun violence, stand-your-ground laws, the interaction of people of color, especially people of color when they are harmed and these larger systems. You know, some of the details of what happened to Trayvon Martin when George Zimmerman killed him are emerged because this group of young activists kind of show up as witnesses to, you know, what is happening. And so I think that it's important to remember that Trayvon Martin's death was the inspiration for the movement, but it was Michael Brown's death that really internationalized it in terms of thinking about this method of arriving at the scene of this moment of state-sanctioned violence, critiquing the inability of response and using that as an opportunity for people to both locally, nationally and internationally to learn more about how structure works. And I think that there's a pedagogical function, a teaching function of what Black Lives Matter does that while it's not as dramatic as some of the kind of larger protest activity that we often tether to social movements, it's the educational quality of social movements that I think we have to remember also. In some ways, the pedagogical value is there because we kind of don't have these kind of larger protest spaces, right? So that moment of arriving on the scene kind of emerges because we don't have these civic, local civic institutions to kind of be there in preparation for this. Right, I mean, if you look at, you know, Ferguson was such an incredible revelatory moment for the nation to think about how communities exist apart from the resources, from the kind of structural leadership. And as all of that information emerges, people are then inspired to think about how they shape their action. You know, when students talk to me about kind of wanting to be part of any type of activist movement now, one of the things I suggest is read about the Student Unviolent Coordinating Committee and read about the titles that people had. Policy Director, Field Director, you know, Northwest Regional Coordinator. This idea that these roles are really about a series of relationships, and all of those relationships were shaped by either policy initiatives that they wanted to push or the inability of policy to protect people equally. And I think that that's the type of thing that we have to bring out if we're really gonna help young people understand the various dynamics of how to make a difference. Yeah, and Joseph, I think this is so helpful because, you know, with so many civic institutions on the decline right now, you know, labor, the church even, you know, and thinking about political parties, kind of not being kind of present in the same way that they were for previous generations, what would you say is the role of your work in particular, which touches on the intersection between art and activism in terms of developing kind of like this infrastructure of participation and engagement that might help young people kind of see participation as viable and worthwhile? So it brings me back a little further in time to 92 in LA when the riots happened, and that was the first time in my life that police violence against people of color was real. And on TV, by real is I've heard stories, I've read things, but to see it on NBC, ABC, CBS, but I didn't have anything to use to respond, you know, I was 12 years old, and that's the beginning age of most of the young people that I work with, who by the time I had heard of it, heard of Trayvon, they had already heard of it, they had already responded to it, they were already texting and tweeting and the response had already happened. So the difference has to be stated for the tools that are being used to speak about and speak directly to these things, these events that are happening. And so in my work, our job is to give young people a platform to express themselves, give them the tools with which to express themselves, and immediately our response was, how do I feel about this and how can that shape the argument? And I think that's what we learned the hard way was, they don't want necessarily to be impacted by our political beliefs in this space, if we believe that they can actually make the difference that we say they can make, they want to be given the tools and for us to sort of show them where to go, but get out of the way in an effort to respond to these incidents. And in that way, our work becomes that of creating a marketing platform. So the open mics, the spoken word events, the slams, all of these things are ways for young people to market their beliefs to themselves based off of what they are experiencing, even if it's not happening directly in front of them. And it just makes it more visceral now to see the videos and to hear their favorite artists responding in music and film and things of that sort to what's going on. And this is for you, Joe, but also for you, Erin, as well. That moment where you say, we want to give them the tools to express themselves is important because it kind of points me towards like what is the use value of talking about young people and youth activism as a unit of analysis? Because in some ways we can talk about the civil rights movement as a movement for civil rights in addition to talking about as a youth movement because there's a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Even now with Parkland, what is the value of talking about it as a movement around gun violence versus a movement that's around kind of like the experiences and the lived experiences of being a young person in this moment. So I guess for all of you, but for Joseph and for Erin in particular, what do you think we gain from talking about, I mean millennials, but even under us, talking in that way and in that mode about youth activism? I'll go first. So yeah, I think it's really complicated when you talk about young people as a unit of analysis given just the divergent experiences across identities, right, across race, across gender, across class. I will say though that one thing I've seen in the Poor People's Campaign and I've seen in other examples is that I think young activists have oftentimes successfully been able to leverage their identity as young people within the context of a political campaign. And I can think of two ways in which that works. So if I'm looking at the Poor People's Campaign, a lot of it is challenging what we say we value in America with what we actually value, right? So if children's rights are lifted up as something that we care about and the lives of children are considered precious, we look at the gap between how children are treated and what we say, right? And young people can leverage that through their protest in a sort of a flip. And I think Parkland in many ways, they've done that, right? They say, you know, you say we care about the lives of children and the lives of teenagers, look what's happening in our schools. A kind of a flip side of that that I think is also interesting and I also wanna raise up is when young people have recognized that based on the laws and institutions of our society, they might actually have more protection as young people and that they can say things and do things that other people can. And I've seen that too. And I see when young people have used themselves as young people to advance, to give an example with the sheriff elections for Sheriff Joe Pio in Phoenix, Arizona, young people organized with Unite here to sort of unseat him. And they did voter registration drives. They did a lot of walkouts, a lot of actions. And they were particularly able to leverage their position as young people because of the fear in their communities of violence that many of their parents and families felt that they themselves didn't fear, didn't feel that they were as vulnerable to. And in that case, the union of analysis of young people, it was successful in sort of carrying out political work. Returns to something I don't think, I answered your question about institutions, right? So we opened this conversation with the labor unions. And so what young people imagine are the institutions that come in and save us when there's a problem. And I think that I often use this as an illustrious example is that my students can't imagine a world where PBS isn't sponsored by a number of people, right? When I say, well, when I was a kid, you turned on Sesame Street and it was just a children's theater workshop. But now it's brought to you by Exxon, brought to you by whatever. So the underwriting of what we think is public, I think shifts our imagination and makes us understand that we in our communities or in our publicly funded entities are not enough. And I think that message as probably has the strongest influence on how students imagine problem solving and how to organize. If I were to say to a group of students, we have everything we need, they'll say, no, but we need a sponsor. And I think the reason why they say that is because that idea of a labor union, the idea of a church being the one that feeds your family if they don't have food. This is an America that no longer exists, but the idea of it so powerful that when communities fail to meet their own needs, when they fail to get the sponsor, they start to believe that there's something faulty in the community and not the larger structure of how people get their needs met. And so I think that when we think about black activism particularly and people say, well, where's the church and black lives matter? And I said, the church was powerful and the civil rights movement because literally the church was the only place you could be. Black people can be in other public spaces generally, right? Without fear of retaliation, most of the time, but if you think about the church as the only place people can organize, then the church becomes powerful, but we can meet online, we can meet in homes, we can meet at another space and it shifts those power dynamics. And I think that we have to keep that in mind because often that is the source of the critique. Well, the institutions are failing or people are failing. It's like, no, the system has failed many entities and we have to kind of reclaim the possibility of it and that thinking is some of the most radical thinking. Yeah, so I was going to, I was originally gonna pick it back up what you said, but now I wanna pick it back up what you said. And what I've been, what I consider success in the spaces that I work in are young people taking it upon themselves to create the space themselves, right? So I will go out and we'll strike a partnership with the Kennedy Center and we do Louder Than the Bomb there and we do that there so that the young people can feel special about having their words broadcast in this hallowed institution or whatever you wanna call the Kennedy Center. But the thing that really matters is will you take it upon yourself to do an open mic in your own school? Like will you do it in the classroom after school with 30 young people because you know that what's really important here is the communion of you guys having these conversations and creating these spaces for yourself. If you can't get the classroom, are you willing to meet outside of the school? Are you willing to meet at the Starbucks? Where are you willing to go without permission because you have had that switch turned on where you realize that what you have to say matters and the only way that it can come to fruition is if you are pursuing these spaces relentlessly to have these conversations. So if we're succeeding, again, it's not in telling them what to think, it's by convincing them that they have the tools to solve the problems if they have the resiliency to see it through. What you both said reminded me of something that Reed said earlier in his opening remarks about, we no longer have as a generation financial security as like a foundation of our lives, we have it as an aspiration. And that change- Can you say that again? We no longer have it as like a foundation in our lives but instead that security is like an aspirational piece. So what that does is it changes our political imagines as you're saying. So it means in some good ways that the atom might be split in terms of the kinds of policies that we would support. So I'm thinking of Senator Gillibrand came out with a policy yesterday about unbanked people being able to kind of get their, do their banking through post offices. There's a different kind of energy that might not have existed, but that also kind of on the flip side means we might be more willing to ascend to authoritarian attitudes. You might be more willing to ascend to kind of less state-centric or organizing, which I'm not casting judgment on one way or the other, but the point is that financial security, security of these institutions and the lack of a sense that you need private large multinational entities to underwrite your entire experience does matter a great deal in terms of the kinds of things you're willing to support, the kinds of things that you want to organize around, the things that you believe can actually gain traction. So that matters quite a bit in terms of what might be valuable in terms of thinking about generational analysis, right? Because if we have a different framework or how we even enter into policy preferences, then we may need to kind of have a different dialogue about what is viable. And you know, based on that, Aaron, your work on the Poor People's Campaign might be helpful here to kind of think of kind of some of these fishers when it comes to activism. So the Poor People's Campaign in kind of some ways articulates itself as a continuation of the civil rights movement, a continuation of these kind of more traditionalist movements. In some ways, it doesn't, though. And I think that's a response to kind of the understanding that the young people are coming from a different place, right? And so you might, I hope you might just talk a little bit about, you know, like the disjunctures between kind of these traditional institution-based movements and what the Poor People's Campaign is both trying to do and trying to push back against right now. Let me say I don't speak as a representative of the Poor People's Campaign, speaking as an individual. But I think, yeah, like definitely, there is definitely an influence of the church present in the Poor People's Campaign, right? The sort of founding coalition of the Poor People's Campaign is personally made up of faith-based groups. At the same time, it understands itself to be sort of a secular movement. I think it's trying to merge both. So it's trying to work within the networks and the frameworks of churches, particularly in the South. I think that's another thing to point on is that when we talk about the decline of the church, we need to be careful in terms of overstating that based on the regions in which we're referring to, right? But they're trying to blend both. So the sort of structure, I think, of the Poor People's Campaign in terms of how they're organizing might exemplify how this is happening. They're doing faith-based chapters. They're connecting impacted people with community and labor organizers, with clergymen and women, right? Forming sort of tri-chairs to work within multiple networks within an entire state and then trying to break through that rule and that urban sort of setting, right? And so I think that's one example in which they're trying to sort of work through that. I hope we all can talk about this moment where it does seem like, you know, when we talk about young people or even just marginalized communities in general, we talk about their preferences as if those preferences are divorced from the shifting of institutions, right? So I mean, it seems like what we're all poing to here is that we need to actually bring, even if those institutions are fraught, right? Because we don't wanna pretend as if just having them there kind of is anti-political, but we do need to bring them back in as we're analyzing what can and cannot work, right? So when we think about the work that institutions can or can't do in terms of responding to the needs of young people, very few institutions are adept at shifting, at remaining grounded in a vision but shifting their pathways to that vision in ways that can accommodate the needs of young people. And I think that this point that you make about financial security is so important because there's this kind of, there's this something is in the air right now where we both appreciate the kind of energy of young people. I think a lot of so-called progressive organizations appreciate the energy of young people, but when young people make demands like salary and benefits, they're like, whoa, these young people are just, ah! You know, they're so entitled and it's like, are you kidding me? And I think what happens is that social change becomes a leisure class activity. Becoming a teacher becomes a leisure profession. Hell, being a professor is a pretty leisure professor. You know, a profession. And so it concerns me that we create a caste system among idealists. And we say to, you know, we say, I think it's so interesting that the Poor People's Campaign is using some of the work that the Southern Christian Leadership Conference is confronting, but they're doing it in so many dynamic ways that you can still bring the idea of King's Poor People Campaign into play in 2018, but you can understand that it has to have some secular ramifications. You have to understand that it has to think about LGBTQ violence. You have to think, you know, it's also thinking about some of this kind of rural urban divide in these really thoughtful ways. So you can't say that, you know, Reverend Barber is just recycling an old idea. No, he's bringing a responsive kind of leadership to a framework and we don't have enough examples of it. And when we don't have those examples, we always see failure because we have an idea of what success looks like. But the thing that concerns me so much isn't that as young people get older, they lose their ideals. It's just that there's no footing. There's no next step. There's no solid step for them to continue on that ideological journey. And I think that that's what we're seeing when we say, you know, in a few years, you'll forget or you won't care. It's like, no, in a few years, my debt will be crushing and I need to take care of my family and my healthcare requires me more to this, like, watch what I eat. These are the things that I think our progressive communities really need to be responsive to. And just really quick. Eve, what you said about progressive organizations not responding to young people, especially with salary benefits, that goes back to the institutions question because they never had to make those asks before because we had these things undergirding our society. So it was not a question the same way that it is now where we're always contingent. I mean, even the labor force more generally is becoming more and more contingent. You talked about the academy, like how much contingent labor for young people, for agents in general, is just taking over the field. So that's a big, big piece of this. There's just some work out of the University of Pennsylvania, a graduate student, and apparently the first person to do this, talking about not necessarily about income inequality, but living paycheck to paycheck as a form of political engagement. And I was like, I couldn't believe that it had not been done before. Honestly, right? That that had not been done before. So just, I know you probably have something to say, but I also wanted to ask you a question. Could you, I mean, because in addition to whatever you're going to say, I really wanted to know if you could talk about this mode of political education for young people. Because it seems that there are some distinct factors that we need to address when we're talking about politicization, consciousness raising, and what that might look like. So I want to talk from your experience and just from your expertise about what that looks like and what it might not look like for other people. Okay, so I'm going to answer, I'm going to say the thing that was in my brain, and I might have you restate what you just asked me because it's just the way it works. I am, I've been working in my position at Smithish Rock for two years now. And before that, I started my own nonprofit and I was there for five years. And I find now that what the biggest obstacle for folks, one of the biggest obstacles for folks that do our type of work is knowing when it's time for us to move on, to do something else. Like if the idea of the poor people's campaign is to be reinvigorated, it has to be reinvigorated with the problems and the issues and the blood of the people who are trying to deal with the issues that are happening to them right now. So I look at executive directors, I look at all of the positions we create inside of these giant nonprofits. And I think that the issue is not the entitlement of the young people, but the fear and the lack of imagination of the folks in the older ranks to be able to walk away and say, there's other things I can do. Now that I've gotten this much experienced under my belt, I can start something else, I can go and I can give speeches, I can do this, I should have been saving my money, but now I'm nervous because I wanna retire, but there's no more social security. And we're holding on to these jobs and we're retiring from working at an educational institution that's based on young people and we're 75 years old, right? And we have to actually say, well, how active were we over the last 30 years when we were dealing with problems that don't directly affect us anymore? And so I think that's something that we in the older generations, really, I never thought I'd say that in my life. No, no, but I mean, it's going to be, if I'm saying if I don't start planning for it now, now should have been 10 years ago, but if I don't start planning for it now, then in 10 years when I have all of these young people that have come through my programs, but now have no real jobs in what we do because I'm still here and my salary is this much and if it was gone, it could be split four ways and we could have four young people doing work because I didn't prepare to not be important in this way. So that was just my, the other half of that is not so much young people get creative and figure it out, it's older people start preparing and maybe the way our system is created is not ideal for people to progress and be able to make a living while also helping and trying to make the world a better place. All right. That's a lovely point. And I think about it with particular respect to housing. So there's a way in which if you are a homeowner, you have a lot of political power and particularly in some of these more urban areas and what people don't really think about is that young people particularly as we kind of move out of college, go into the young professional world from 20 to 27 approximately, are rent burdened at much, much higher rates in previous generations. Now what that means politically is that if you go to like a zoning council or a kind of like a county council, they're primarily run by people that are older, that have equity in their homes and basically can control in many ways how expensive places are, the amount of housing that is available, all these ways. So there are many notes in which you need young people to be represented and that we're not, right? If you look at all of these things that were 50 years ago, traditions of success, college now is one of the most expensive things to have and that college education. A home now is one of the most expensive things to have. Paying for your healthcare is one of the most expensive things to have. How can you be an activist, a revolutionary when you trade your $80,000 of college debt for $500,000 of house debt? And again, the question becomes not wrong or right, but how can we address those issues while still trying to address the issues that we are already working on? Can I say, and this is the political education. So all of the kind of like the think pieces that are like, oh, it's horrible to be young. Sorry guys, we got the benefits of all the system. Good luck. That is not a political education, that's noise. A political education is to say, okay, how are we gonna organize all the young renters in this community? And how are they gonna show up at the meetings? And how am I as a homeowner going to think about you who want to rent in my neighborhood and how to be really just about it? How am I gonna tell my colleagues who own property to say, hey guys, this is what housing discrimination is. You may not wanna do this. And you know what, when we think about setting rents on the properties we own, I'm about to show an apartment I own to a tenant, right? I want young people to be able to rent my apartment. These are choices I have to make about how much I should rent my apartment for, because I'm in Washington DC and I remember getting my first job here, reminding people that this is where political work happens, that it isn't just registering to vote and vote and it's not just paying your taxes, which is also very important, but it's also understanding that the more power we amass, then our personal choices become highly political. So I can't say, well, I would never discriminate against someone who's renting. It's like, well, I have to send a rent price that is actually reasonable, that someone could move into my apartment and live in it, right? And those are the places where the radical work happens because these are making choices and these are those exchanges that you're talking about. But if we don't even introduce that to people as political work, then we're losing all of our power is left on the table and we're just kind of, we're playing musical chairs around it. And so I think when we think about political education, our strongest work is in drilling down all of the places in which we can hoard our power and gently inviting people to disperse a little bit of it at a time. Yeah. And that's leaving your job, leaving your job. Yeah, I'm doing a second that enthusiastically and say now, and you reminded me of what the question was so you don't need to repeat it, political education, I'm gonna say three facets. I might only hit two, there might be four. We'll see how it goes. Let's go for the ride. Yeah, buckle up. Yeah, I like speaking in numbers. First thing is leading by example. I find my job to be a political job, right? And so four months ago, I'm pulling my hair out. I'm having this, I'm having a horrible time. I haven't slept. One of my young people comes in and they say, man, you know, I used to wanna do what you do, but now I'm good on me. Like I have no desire to get paid when I know you get paid to do what you're doing. And I thought to myself, I just gave this young person an awful political education. I'm not taking care of myself. I'm not creating this space in a way that makes it seem like they would want to come into this work. It doesn't have to be this hard. And so our lives are as an example itself. And that goes into not just making better decisions but broadcasting it. Like I'm putting my apartment for rent for this much and this is why, right? And I can still eat, right? It is, and it's looking. And so the second thing is destroying this perception of what security means to this idea that we have to, I mean, I took a very weird path. Like I, after school, I just kind of roamed the world trying to be an artist. But what I learned in that space was that I can survive off of $12,000 a year, right? Now that's not ideal. But it's also not the opposite of where I don't feel like I've been successful or that I am secure unless I'm making $100,000 a year, right? There's something in the middle where when we're working with young people, we have to attack the definition of success or have them attack their definition of success based off of what we've shown them in the past. And we also have to attack our and theirs definition of what security is. Because a lot of the things that we do are reaction to needing or wanting to feel secure. Like I'm gonna go and I'm gonna drop this $120,000 on this education so that I have the security of being able to make a certain amount of money for the rest of my life. Well, that one decision based off of what you perceive security just handcuffed you for the next 15 years, right? To having to pay this off. And it's kind of hard to be like, you know what, I'm gonna skip work and go out to that march because if I get fired, and this is something that's not brand new to anybody, but it's just when I'm working with young people, I have to remember I'm not just teaching poetry, right? I can't just be, now we're gonna edit our poems. It's like, well, what are we gonna do with our poems and what are we gonna do with our bodies after we leave this space? How do we take the idea of editing? And so this is number three, the actual tools of what we do in our space of editing poetry, writing poetry, asking hard questions, creating space. How do those things translate to activism outside of writing poems? So again, if they are learning what we are hopefully trying to teach them, they are realizing that they have to ask these goal-setting questions about their lives and that they can edit it as they go through. And they have to be able to be willing to ask themselves hard questions and then share those answers to a group of people. That's what a poetry slam is ultimately. If you don't know what spoken word poetry, raise your hand if you know what it is. All right, cool, awesome. I just wanted to make sure. I was talking about poetry and poetry slam and maybe you don't know what it is. But that all it is is everyone writing letters to themselves and to each other about what it is they care the most about and being willing to share and that's the first step in any real radical change is being able to have a conversation and be vulnerable in a space. And so whatever it is that you do with young people, just to make sure that those lessons are getting through. I had a phone call last night with two young people from two different teams that are competing this weekend in our competition and it was an hour-long conversation about the rules. They were upset that these rules made it harder for teams from this area to compete and so on and so forth and I had to just take a step back and say, I appreciate you calling and trusting me enough to come to me with this. But the reality is if this is what we're arguing about at 10.30 at night, then I have not given you, I haven't not led you in the right direction. And so instead of having a conversation about rules, we had a hour-long conversation about the reason why we have to make these spaces equitable for both teams that are in Arlington and teams that are in Southeast DC. So maybe you don't get to do all of the poems with all of the people that you imagine, but we do that so that we can bring everybody to the table. And then, okay, all right, it's not about poetry anymore. Does that make sense to people? Hopefully that was useful for those of you who don't work at poetry organizations. But you know, I do wanna, but as you guys are talking about political education, I do wanna actually talk about education more formally because I think there is a moment at which all this talk about what I call lower case P political education is done, but capital P political education is done in higher education, particularly, right? And that space is so dominated and so dominates our perceptions of what young people are and the activism around it. And I know you've talked about this before in that length. I would love for you to go into a little bit of detail about what we think about with respect to young people and kind of as particularly in the higher ed space, right? What is student activism in that world and what is it not? So one of the things I think is interesting at this moment are organizations that label themselves youth organizations and organizations that label themselves as student organizations. And you know, if you look at Black Youth Project 100, they're very intentional saying we're not a student organization, we are a youth organization. So your relationship to a college campus does not define kind of the political ways that you enter. But the reality is that college campuses are an excellent place in which we see movement building and movement support and organizing happen. I think one of the ways I like to allow my profession to take credit for this because I think we have to stand up for it. But one of the things I think is most powerful is young activists who are organizing in the mode that reflects the shift in how we teach civil rights history. So when I talk to a young person who is part of a social movement, they'll say, we organize on these principles because we don't wanna make the mistakes that they made in the 50s or the 60s. They're very clear that there were mistakes in the mainstream civil rights movement. How do they know there were mistakes? Because there are actually historians who are willing to write a different history of the past that we are no longer stuck in this mode of celebration. We're in a mode of analysis. That was only possible because the academy was able to expand enough to bring in scholars of color and women. When you have history written from a different perspective, history's value also shifts. And the reason why I always say this is because as someone who teaches in the humanities in higher ed, I'm under attack because I apparently teach something that's useless that everyone needs. And I'm in an industry that we are now at a point where I think people are saying it like 43% of people of a certain political orientation think that higher ed is ruining the country and not helping it. And so I make this point all the time that just so you know what we do and why we do it, all of that is to say that the political education of higher ed, whether a student's on the right or the left, it happens the second a family has to make a commitment or that individual has to make a commitment or the GI bill has to make a commitment to pay for that education. Welcome to political life. The second you make that kind of financial commitment, you are now in a political process. The question is, are we transparent enough in higher ed to say that regardless of the classes you take or your major, you are getting one of the finest political educations because you were probably subject to a student loan processor. You are subject to the Department of Education's shifting perspectives on the regulation of student loans. You are now subject to some of the protocols for federally funded research. You are a political subject, my friend, whether you like it or not. And so I think that our responsibility in higher education is to expose the way that students are at the center of a series of political processes, some more vulnerable than others, that they have to understand as part of the experience because we often frame the political work of higher ed as some ideological battlefield that just like does not exist between liberal professors and administrators and conservatives. That is not what is happening. What is happening is we have generations of young people who are engaged in some of the consequences of policies that are made by people who do not know higher education, who are often at institutions run by people who have no background in higher education and they are subject to all those whims. If that is the type of stuff that, if the New York Times would write more think pieces about that, there would be a real revolution on college campuses because students would be radicalized by the conditions in which they are learning and the policies that are governing their professionalization and their future. I'm just saying. So it is all deeply political. We just have to do some more unmasking. I wish this were filmed so that we could take a break after every time you talk and I could have a moment to catch up. Yeah, because I'm processing all of that and I agree passionately with what you were saying. And I deal mostly with high school students and public schools and that's the same. It's the same thing in those spaces. So I'm not gonna name the school district but I was recently brought into a school district to do a professional development and the teachers, they all gathered around when we came in and it's like, we know what you said you were here for but what we really want is to learn how to bring these political issues that our young people are talking about into the classroom without getting fired for it. And so that became the conversation as opposed to whatever I thought I was there to teach. And that in and of itself should be a political education for the teachers. The fact that we're in this room huddled quietly so that the person who hired me doesn't hear what we're talking about so we can figure out how to get young people, give them permission to talk about the issues that are already affecting them. So that's number one. We have to be unafraid and create spaces or create tools rather where people are speaking to those things that aren't necessarily directly in the line of fire. And so it is our newspaper. So it is the editorial. So it is the Huffington's and so on and so forth. We have to find a way to get stories to them. They get stories out about these spaces so that teachers who are already being inundated from every direction aren't also now having to put their entire livelihood so that our young people can get a better education. Secondly, for those of us outside of that sphere who have a little more leeway, we need to make sure that our programming is directed in that space also. So for example, we did a thing this summer called the James Baldwin Institute where we brought young people in and we said, we gave them a survey. What political issues are directly affecting your life? And I kind of did it like a bracket beforehand and I figured, I bet you they're gonna say these five things and I was completely wrong. The number one thing was how to get jobs. These are young people signing up for a writing workshop but they're like, yeah, this is great. The only reason we're here is because DC is paying us to be here. Otherwise we would be working at Chipotle right now and now they're really far away from getting whatever education we could have offered them. And so we had to create our program based around the things that are directly affecting their lives so that they can see that there can be change, right? If they learn about these things that that's the first step in them actually being able to do something about it and the movements of the past, they have to be told twofully. These people have to be made to seem like humans because otherwise, and this is where the storytellers are at fault, we sing these songs and we exclude all the blood and the scars and the injuries out of it and it's just Martin Luther King, the statue and that Martin Luther King, the human who was scared and was nervous and second guessed himself and made bad decisions and had to recover from that. And therefore I, young man from Southeast actually could be that for my community. I could actually do that. Yeah, I come from a mother who is addicted to drugs and a father who's gone and but I don't have to end here. And that's the power of storytelling and that's the power of us being able to create those spaces where we are encouraging people to tell their whole story and not just the success and not just the good parts. I don't know where I am in the conversation right now but that's how I feel about it. Well, I do want to open up for questions because we have a time left. I will say this, I heard Marcia say this before and I loved it. A question is a search for knowledge not a recitation of it. So be aware of that as you ask her questions. But please open it up. I'm so excited to hear from you guys. See if this works. I loved how you talked about the culture on college campuses. I graduated from UCLA a year and a half ago. And one of the things that is going on currently with our campus is we're seeing the infiltration of groups like Turning Point USA and others because of the structure. And Jane Mayer, New Yorker, I should say, did an article on this. I was just wondering if you could comment on the culture that's really being created because all these right wing donors and right wing organizations are literally trying to run not only congressional style campaigns on college campuses, but like you're saying, creating this huge environment. I'd just love to hear your thoughts on the whole institutions. So Jane and Nancy McLean's book about the Koch brothers and my former dissertation advisor in the Washington Post this week, Matt Garcia, talked about some things at Arizona State. Let me be very clear. There is no golden age of benevolence and robust public funding. Whether I talk about the civil rights movement of the 50s or the labor movements of the 20s and 30s, there have always been dollars in these movements. Someone has to pay for signs. Someone has to pay for the buses and the sandwiches. So I want to be very clear that when I talk about robust public institutions, I'm not saying places that are free from outside money, but the self-determination of the organization and the possibility to imagine within those I think was stronger. With that being said, what is happening in higher education is the continued donor influence. My concern is that the concessions that are made to donors now are done in a deep awareness that the state legislatures are not coming to save us. The federal government is not coming to save us. So the checks and balances that both public and private universities could have made on donors and saying, look, you're not going to pick all the faculty. And we can't say we're only doing this one thing. That lessons as public support of higher education lessons. And so now institutions are in this very desperate position where they're taking money from wherever it can come because they know they're not going to recover those dollars. And similarly, legislative retaliation against colleges and universities is something we have to be very, very cautious of. Listen, I don't mind people donating to higher ed. I completely understand that impulse. But what I am concerned about is when we have multiples, we have two political science departments. We have two history departments. We have two American civilization programs because there's one ideological commitment that funds one and the other one may not be equally funded or more susceptible to retaliation. And so I think all of this is a great opportunity for us to really learn what higher education is now. You might have gone to college in the 90s. That framework doesn't help you to understand colleges today. And if you went to college in the 50s, that framework doesn't help you understand colleges today. But it goes to your point that our leadership structures are stuck in the moment in which they had the experience rather than very attentive to the ways that these things grow and shift. Hi, I'm Gustavo Karnige. So my question, so it seems like the undercurrent of what you guys keep talking about is that there fundamentally needs to be some kind of large, like as you just said, like capital is needed. That's how Fight for 15 has been successful because SEIU has spent tens of millions of dollars on organizing that. And the buses were paid for, the science were paid for. There is money, is the ability to get organizing going. So I'm wondering, my question for you guys is, how do you structure particularly political education capital P, capital E, like Christian was saying, how do you structure policy engagement, particularly among youth, particularly among lay people, towards that ultimate goal of there needs to be a redistribution of capital from the bad guys to the good guys? Well, I'll just say two things on that. So when you think about higher, and political education more generally, as Marsha kind of pointed us to, not as like kind of sitting around a circle or a classroom, but rather as the product of a series of decisions, then it becomes harder to kind of delineate between the good guys and the bad guys sometimes. So that's the first thing. But your point about us needing to kind of really establish capital as a framework, or capitalism, capital, kind of in terms of stockpiling it, is we need to kind of understand what's actually going on, it's what you're talking about with unmasking. So it's very difficult sometimes to see Americans for prosperity as kind of a bad guy, not because it isn't, but because they actually have a very, very variegated scheme of what they do. So it's not always something that we might, on the front end, classify as conservative, or even like necessary, I mean there are these principles that guide them, but nothing, but not that much else. So it becomes very difficult and a moving target in terms of what their goals are. So some of the work that we do analytically is understanding kind of the breadcrumbs of where these things are going. So that's where I'd start, I don't know, I don't know if that's where I'd end up. I would add that a lot of the work has to come with, let me back up, the decisions that get made as to what gets taught in schools and how budgets are distributed are made by people, and they're people that are in elected positions, but on elected positions that you're never going to hear about on the news. So the people who are telling me that I can't talk about this particular thing in school, they like 165 people came to the election that put them into that spot on the school board, or whatever it may be, and so the political education has to be based around, and this is something I personally believe, getting people more involved on local small levels to make those decisions, and to get those positions changed. We're talking about the young people that are talking about voting out the senators and voting out the president and voting out congressmen and so on and so forth, but their school superintendent is a person that needs to get voted out, and they might not be millionaires, but they're living comfortably, and somebody made their signs too, and it wasn't them. So on that lower level, we need to, people, everyone's staring at the bright light, and we need to bring it down a little bit and take this opportunity and this new invigoration of young people and try to guide it towards them wanting to do those positions themselves. There's no reason why a 30-year-old can't be the superintendent of a school district. There's no reason why that can't be, right? They were the ones that were just there, right? They have an eye, they have eyes on what can really make a difference in that space, but it's, yeah, that's... You know, and to that point, what's important about that is, not only are we not talking about superintendent, not talking about registrars, people that really, so a lot of my work at New America is on voting rights. There's so many small people that have such huge impacts on our lives that are elected officials that we know nothing about, right? So those are the, and in some ways, the lights are not on them on purpose. So this is where these, again, these series of decisions that are being made, there are so many people that affect our election times, where we can vote. All these different things that are elected that we know nothing about. So that's another piece of this puzzle. In the, yes, okay. Hi, I wanted to follow up on the comments around education and I wanted to hear from Joseph and the professor about what you see as a difference between civic education and political education. I think we're seeing more of a push for even civic education in the school system and even graduation requirements around this, but it doesn't seem to get at the heart of teaching young people how to be active. And so I wanted to hear your thoughts on that. The distinction I would make is civic education is about processes that are highly impersonal and political education is about the various ways that power moves. And so a lot of our conversation about youth activism is a form of political education because it talks about the ways that people leverage power that is both given by the state and not recognized by the state. So if you have a bunch of 16 year olds in Florida who are saying we're gonna be able to vote in two years but in the meantime, we're gonna raise hell around this gun issue. This is a kind of way in which power kind of mutes, right? Like it goes from everyone who's voting age to people who are slightly under voting age. So I think the political education piece in my work with K through 12 teachers, I always say the most political work that you can do within your restraints is do the civic education and just use political examples. No one can get upset about that. Those are some of the ways we get around the hesitancy and the resistance to doing more political education. And I'm gonna stick with the professor's distinction between I'm not going to redefine, but as far as getting it out there and getting it into day to day life and getting young people to think that they can actually make a difference is doing a better job of defining the actions and for me, I have these conversations and I say for every video that you watch on YouTube about this, can you take a moment to watch a YouTube video about something political or about a movement or a speech from somebody? Can you start splitting your time and attention a little differently? Because I think what happens after that is a natural progression. After that, I don't need to say voting is important. You're going to know. I don't have to say that to deciding what neighborhood you wanna live in is important. You're going to figure that out. You're gonna see that we've already lived through these things and for whatever reason, there's so much noise in between you and getting to those spaces and getting to that education that you are going to have to deliberately reeducate yourself. And the tools are out there if you're willing to take the time to sort of back away from the things that they tell you a 16 year old is supposed to care about as opposed to the things that we know that they can and do care about when it steps into their own backyard or into their schools. So we have just about two minutes left. So if anyone has a question, I'm gonna let Micah and Braxton kind of just give you the mic and then we'll kind of answer the rapid fire style. So who still has a question? No more questions? Oh, wait, let's see. Too soon. All right, go ahead, please. Sorry. There we go. There was a good discussion earlier about what's happening on college campuses and I think that of course we're thinking about four year residential campuses, traditional quote unquote age students and others are still, despite all of the obstacles, pretty good places for people to become politically active and engaged. And so I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about spaces or areas of life for social interactions where that kind of education and self organizing and sort of experimentation with organizing can be happening with other, the majority of young people who don't go to four year colleges. I'll just say really quickly, that is such an important point because the vast majority of students do not go to four year residential colleges and so it's important to make that note. I will say that if we get to this moment at which we're thinking about political education, not as reading Audre Lorde, who is critical, I hope everyone reads Audre Lorde, but also thinking about a series of decisions that kind of lead you to a specific moment. There's actually a lot of organizing that happens at community colleges sometimes because of that very reason that because people see the budget cuts, the financial devastation as something to organize and to raise hell about. So it can happen, but we really have to do some really critical work nationally and at the local level of redefining what would mean by capital people political. Real quick, I'm sorry. Start younger, one, two, we need nonprofit organizations and foundations to start focusing on young people between the ages of 18 and 24, more so than they do now. Apprenticeship programs, different spaces for them to go and learn directly internships that are paid, things of that sort so that it's not four-year university, community college or vocation, there are other things that you can do to figure out how to be an active member of your country. Yes. I say this in a loving way, the internet. This is why I love the internet. People are organizing themselves in all sorts of collectives on the internet and I think that's actually really good because it doesn't diminish for the in the ground organizing and the break room. That 15 minute like federally mandated break, politics are happening at that break and I think the question is do we have organizations to help then connect the resources to that organizing that happens? And on that note, we will go to break right now. There is, there are, there's stuff right here in the back so we'll take about a 10 minute break and then we'll kind of have our closing panel. So thank you guys so much for being here and taking part.